Financial inclusion

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Financial inclusion (German: financial inclusion ) means the availability of services of the formal financial sector for everyone and their use by as many as possible. Moneylenders and the use of cash in payment transactions and for safekeeping are considered informal and problematic. Unlike traditional development aid, financial inclusion is an approach to poverty reduction pursued by public institutions in close cooperation with the private sector, which, in order to be sustainable, should generate profits. According to supporters of financial inclusion, such as the World Bank , it is essential to eradicate extreme poverty. In the "Maya Declaration" of 2011, 70 member central banks of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion from developing and emerging countries committed themselves to recognize the paramount importance of financial inclusion for the empowerment and improvement of the living conditions of poor people.

Concept emergence

In the semi-official language of the international development and financial community, the term financial inclusion is a successor to the term microcredit, which describes the commercial microcredit business with poor people in developing and emerging countries. With the expansion of the range of financial services offered by microfinance institutions, the term microfinance (German: microfinance) initially became common. From around 2009 microfinance was increasingly being replaced by financial inclusion, mainly because international institutions coined and preferred the latter term.

History and institutional framework

At the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, USA, on September 24-25, 2009, the heads of government pledged to improve the access of the poor to financial services and, building on the example of microfinance, decided to ensure the safe and healthy expansion of financial services promote. To this end, the G20 Financial Inclusion Experts Group was founded in collaboration with the public-private Consultative Group to Assist the Poor ( CGAP ) and the World Bank subsidiary IFC. This working group created G20 principles for Innovative Financial Inclusion, which the G20 adopted at their summit in Toronto in May 2010. They support the Financial Inclusion Action Plan, which the G20 adopted at their summit in Seoul in November 2010. Financial inclusion was described as “one of the pillars of the global development agenda”. The Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (GPFI) was founded as an “inclusive platform for all G20 countries , interested non-G20 countries and relevant stakeholders” for institutionalization. It wants to promote financial inclusion because it is seen as a particularly important prerequisite for economic development for the benefit of the poorest. They support the implementation partners in the public-private partnerships Better Than Cash Alliance and Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP). The Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI), founded and financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is another implementation partner of the GPFI.

The international standard-setting organizations in the financial sector have committed to shaping their standards in such a way that financial inclusion is promoted. These include the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering and Terrorism Finance (FATF), the Basel Banking Committee, and the Payment and Settlement System Committee (CPSS). The same goes for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Financial inclusion and digitization of payment transactions

In a broader sense that is often used, financial inclusion means increasing the use of digital payment transactions at the expense of the use of cash, which is considered expensive and unsafe. In 2011, the international standard-setter FATF (Anti-Money Laundering) recognized in a policy paper on financial inclusion that it serves the FATF's goals to bring more customers and transactions from the opaque, untraceable world of cash to the traceable world of formal financial services. Accordingly, he has committed himself to the GPFI to make his standards for financial service providers anti-cash.

In September 2016, the G20 put the word “digital” before financial inclusion and passed the High Level Principles for Digital Financial Inclusion, which the business consultancy BCG describes in a report as institutional support for the transition to cashless economies. According to calculations by the consulting firm, the complete elimination of cash would increase the annual gross domestic product of developed economies by 1% and of developing countries by 3%.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ G20 Principles for Innovative Financial Inclusion , developed in 2010 by the Access Through Innovation Subgroup (ATISG) of the G20 Financial Inclusion Experts Group (FIEG), reprinted by the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI).
  2. ^ World Bank: Zambia Launches its First National Financial Inclusion Strategy . Press release. 11th August 2017.
  3. ^ Access Through Innovation Sub-Group of the G20 Financial Inclusion Experts Group: “ Innovative Financial Inclusion: Principles and Report ”. May 25, 2010. p. 15.
  4. ^ Access Through Innovation Sub-Group of the G20 Financial Inclusion Experts Group: “Innovative Financial Inclusion: Principles and Report”. 25 May 2010. p. 9.
  5. ↑ G20 Principles for Innovative Financial Inclusion , developed in 2010 by the Access Through Innovation Subgroup (ATISG) of the G20 Financial Inclusion Experts Group (FIEG), reprinted by the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI).
  6. ↑ GPFI: Implementing Partners. Retrieved July 29, 2019 .
  7. ↑ GPFI: Global Standard Setting Bodies and Financial Inclusion. S. II. 2011, accessed on July 28, 2019 (English).
  8. ↑ GPFI: Global Standard Setting Bodies and Financial Inclusion . S. II. 2011, accessed on August 1, 2019 (English).
  9. ↑ BCG: How Cashless Payments Help Economies Grow . May 28, 2019. Retrieved August 1, 2019.