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Reaching the world’s two billion unbanked: ITU Focus
Group makes steady progress
Group shares initial findings from Digital Financial Services Ecosystem
and Consumer Experience and Protection working groups
Geneva, 16 June 2016 – Today the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU)
Focus Group on Digital Financial Services has published the
first of a series of thematic reports on Digital Financial Services, or DFS. The
DFS Focus Group is looking at helping local policy and decision makers to
accelerate their work on financial inclusion by providing practical tools,
guidelines and recommendations on issues that are currently preventing the DFS
market to develop organically. This represents the first step in developing an
international roadmap of best practice guidelines for regulators, operators and
providers in the telecom and financial services sectors and serving the unbanked
in a sustainable manner.
Specifically focused around two of the four working groups, DFS Ecosystem and
Consumer Experience and Protection, the four background documents were endorsed
at the Focus Group’s recent meeting in Washington DC.
ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao said: “What makes this Focus Group
different is its holistic approach. After more than a year of intensive work,
experts are completing some preliminary analysis and have started to develop a
robust and relevant framework together with very pragmatic recommendations that
will hopefully deliver real change and opportunity.”
Sacha Polverini, Chairman of the Focus Group and Senior Programme Officer of
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Financial Services for the Poor (FSP)
programme, said: “Our initial observations provide two things: firstly, the
publication of the Digital Financial Services Ecosystem report provides an
agreed understanding between all relevant parties; secondly, our analysis
of key elements of the process, such as issues around merchant acceptance and
the role that national identity schemes can play, has helped provide a better
understanding of how we can facilitate greater access to DFS in emerging
markets. We made some surprising findings.”
Carol Coye Benson, Managing Partner at Glenbrook Partners and Working Group
Co-Chair for DFS Ecosystem, added: “The key challenge in reaching digital
liquidity is to balance both sides of the equation. To get real value it’s
important to drive money into the system and to keep it in. The way to do that
is to enable bulk (G2P) payments into transaction accounts and simultaneously
enable merchant electronic payment acceptance, so that consumers have a place to
spend their e-Money.”
Reports from the DFS Focus Group:
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The Digital Financial Services Ecosystem: Maps the
overall ecosystem of DFS, identifying all key stakeholders, and
looks at the critical elements necessary to make the ecosystem
develop so that it encourages and enables financial inclusion
policies.
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Enabling Merchant Payments Acceptance in the Digital Financial
Ecosystems: Describes the merchant services value
chain, develops a segmentation scheme for different types of
payments acceptors, and identifies the payments-related
attributes of each segment. It also develops suggestions on ways
to accelerate the adoption of electronic payments acceptance.
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Review of National Identity Programmes – A report from the Evans
School of Public Policy and Governance: Looks at 48
national identify programmes in 43 developing countries. With
identification systems becoming more common across Latin
America, South and Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, the
report concludes that not only is penetration much higher than
expected, but so are the number of biometric national ID
programmes. It evaluates how these programmes are being used to
drive provision of DFS services.
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Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) aspects
of Digital Financial Services: This Report
identifies and proposes Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to be
considered for digital financial services.
The remaining Focus Group deliverables will be published incrementally from
now through to the end of the year, focused around the two remaining meetings
scheduled in East Africa in September, and the final meeting in Geneva in
December 2016. The final recommendations are scheduled to be published in
January 2017.
Notes to the Editor
In 2014, ITU established a dedicated Focus Group incorporating 60
organizations from some 30 countries. The Focus Group has created four thematic
working groups covering the following areas: DFS ecosystem; Technology;
Innovation and Competition; Interoperability and Consumer Experience &
Protection. The group’s goal is to develop guidelines, principles and toolkits
based on international best practices, which will be adapted and implemented by
countries looking to capitalize on digital and mobile technologies in their
efforts to increase access to basic financial services for people that today
remain at the margin of society.
For more information or interviews with Mr Sacha Polverini, please
contact:
Sanjay Acharya
Chief, Media Relations and Public Information, ITU
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Marcus Pepperell
FTI Consulting
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