The Second Meeting of the Governors of Developing Eight (D-8) Countries brought together senior officials from member nations on 21 November 2012 in Islamabad, Pakistan, to discuss objectives in increasing a mutual understanding of various economic and financial sector challenges, including how to achieve increased financial inclusion within the organization’s countries.

According to the meeting’s joint communiqué, financial inclusion will remain a top priority within D-8 member countries as it alleviates financial constraints on low-income households and enables them to benefit from better economic opportunities as well as creates employment.

“We also note the effectiveness of existing policy frameworks and institutions and progress made on various innovative new approaches to financial inclusion,” the governors stated in the communiqué. “We reaffirm our support to promote financial inclusion in D-8 countries. In this regard, we will take important measures to advance the financial inclusion agenda.”

Specifically, D-8 senior officials intend to:

• Reaffirm or formulate national financial inclusion strategies in their countries and gather support from their respective government, financial sector and additional key stakeholders to build broad-based ownership of a financial inclusion agenda.
• Study policy approaches for building delivery channels and payments systems such as agent-based banking, mobile phone banking, and post office networks.
• Form a D-8 Consultative Group on Financial Inclusion (CGFI) with representation from each central bank. Additionally, the CGFI will have a series of knowledge exchange exercises, consultations and produce a comprehensive document by the next D-8 Summit.

AFI member institutions Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), Bank Indonesia (BI), Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and Bangladesh Bank (BB) help comprise the D-8 along with the central banks of Egypt, Iran and Turkey. 

SBP Governor Yaseen Anwar served as Chair of the meeting.