Training on Approaches to Enhancing Financial Inclusion Through DFS – Opening remarks by AFI Deputy Executive Director, Norbert Mumba

PPD Training on Approaches to Enhancing Financial Inclusion Through DFS,
African Financial Inclusion Policy Initiative (AfPI)
Tuesday, 26 February 2019
Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire

Opening remarks by Norbert Mumba, Deputy Executive Director, AFI

• Chalouho Coulibaly, National Director of BCEAO of Côte d’Ivoire
• Arn Vogels, Country Manager & Area Business Head, FSSA, Mastercard
• Killian Clifford, Mobile Money Policy & Advocacy Director, GSMA
• Delegates from AFI member institutions
• Teams of our partner institutions
• Colleagues from AFI

Bonjour Comment ca va! Merci, Mr. Coulibaly, for such a warm welcome to Ivory Coast. We are indeed delighted to be here and to make it our home in Africa. I also wish to take this opportunity to thank the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Cote d’Ivoire and the BCEAO for the warm reception and for hosting this year’s series of AfPI events and this capacity building program.

Today is the second day of this week-long event. Today and tomorrow, AFI brings to you a training – Approaches to Enhancing Financial Inclusion Through Digital Financial Services – as part of its offerings under its Public-Private Dialogue or PPD. AFI’s Public Private Dialogue or PPD, established in 2014, is a unique, global platform of public and private sector decision-makers working together to advance financial inclusion. This particular event is being offered in collaboration with Mastercard and GSMA. While it’s the 6th year of collaboration with Mastercard, this is the second year in a row that we have a training by GSMA.

This training is very critical for two reasons:

As AFI completed 10 years in 2018, we celebrated a decade of policy making specifically targeted at enhancing financial inclusion globally. This year AFI enters its third phase of its five-year corporate strategy. As most of our members now have documented national financial inclusion strategy, the focus going ahead is on strategy implementation to achieve the desired impact.

Stakeholder coordination is the biggest challenge when it comes to in-country implementation, especially because of the wide range of new players in the sector and the growing ecosystem. This training being an offering under PPD, we will discuss the challenges in collaboration for in country implementation from the perspectives of both the public and private sector, from regulator and implementors.

The second reason, of course, is enhancing financial inclusion through digitization taking into account women’s financial inclusion and sustainability. While digitization accelerates financial inclusion, it brings significant added responsibilities for the financial regulators. This forum will discuss these innovative tools, the shared responsibilities of the public-private sector and the challenges and some proven solutions.

Digitization calls for responsibility of both the consumer and financial service provider especially that digital innovations also bringing in millions of first-time consumers into the mainstream finance. And we have seen immediate impact of that in the Member Needs Assessment (MNA) conducted by AFI, where members have indicated consumer protection and financial education as their top learning need, followed by DFS. The need and relevance of consumer education becomes more relevant when we also see the increasing numbers of cyber frauds. Thus, in this training, we give special focus to prevention of cyber fraud and to establishing resilient systems.

Capacity Building continues to be a service much in demand. In 2018, we trained over 500 individuals from 77-member institutions, which is 73% of the current members base. They gave the trainings 90% satisfaction and 88% relevance rating.  We commit to follow closely the learning needs of our members and continue to serve you through a new range of capacity building events in 2019.

We have worked with Mastercard previously on innovation and cybersecurity and we will delve deeper into it this time, as cybersecurity challenges continue to increase and as demanded by members. We thank Mastercard for their continued support.

We are fortunate to have GSMA with us as they launch the 2018 State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money this week. I am sure you are as eager as we are to be updated on the increased number of the mobile money services, the emerging trends and what they mean for us. We thank GSMA for bringing us these details and help us plan our initiatives in our respective jurisdictions.

Our sincere appreciation to our host institutions Ministry of Economy and Finance and the BCEAO, particularly the hardworking staff assigned to these events. Were are aware that there are many other government institutions that have made our coming possible. Please extend our sincere appreciation to all.

Merci Beaucoup