BDT导演角：演讲

It's a pleasure to join you today for this spotlight session on the impact of COVID on financial inclusion and the importance of inclusive connectivity and access to digital financial services.

Over the past year and a half, the COVID crisis has imposed a rapid pivot to digital finance. For many companies and individuals, that may have simply accelerated a process of digital transformation that was already well underway.

But the move online has also dramatically highlighted today's highly unequal access to digital networks, services and devices, while posing significant challenges for smaller and emerging players, raising important cybersecurity concerns, and opening the box to a whole host of highly complex regulatory issues.

Worldwide, digital financial platforms are pushing forward the frontiers of economic inclusion. Digital Financial Services – or DFS – have now been launched in more than 80 countries, allowing millions of individuals and businesses to move from exclusively cash-based transactions to formal financial services via a simple mobile phone or laptop computer.

DFS are bringing access to banking, insurance and other important financial services to a greater number of people than ever before. In developing countries in particular, they are also helping small-scale enterprises access core services, such as affordable credit, that are so vital to business sustainability and growth.

But while the trend is largely positive, marginalized populations are being left behind. In our post-pandemic world, the ability to connect to useable, affordable digital services is the new baseline for full social and economic inclusion.

On the supply side, ICT infrastructure is often still lacking or insufficient for meaningful, affordable access.

On the demand side, people in unserved and underserved areas may lack basic literacy and numeracy skills and the knowledge of how to use digital technologies, even when they are available.

And the huge surge in online fraud and cyber crime sparked by the COVID pandemic has heightened risks and vulnerabilities around DFS, particularly for new or unskilled users.

At the same time, DFS are themselves creating complex new relationships between ICT players and financial markets that bring their own challenges.

As convergence accelerates, it is clear that the ICT regulatory community will need to work ever more closely with financial and competition regulators – yet, for now, there are no clear mechanisms and frameworks for doing so.

Fostering dialogue and collaboration across sectors needs to be a priority, so that we can strike the right balance between enabling financial innovation that brings essential financial services like banking and access to credit to people everywhere, while addressing challenges in areas like financial and digital literacy, data privacy, data biases and cyber risks.

Today's discussions under the umbrella of the Financial Inclusion Global Initiative, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and implemented in partnership with ITU, the World Bank Group, and the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructure, are an important part of this inter-sectoral, international dialogue. We will also be delving further into this important topic in ITU's Global Symposium for Regulators, which takes place this year from 21-25 June.

The pandemic has reinforced the urgent need to transition to digital – but has also thrown a sharp spotlight on growing global inequalities, particularly the chronic and sometimes gaping digital divide separating the digitally rich, and the digitally poor.

DFS can be a powerful driver of development – but we urgently need to put them within reach of the people who need them, and find ways to empower those people to use these transformational services safely, and productively, to improve their own lives, and the lives of their families and communities.

Thank you.

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