Transcripts For CSPAN Key Capitol Hill Hearings 20240622 : v

CSPAN Key Capitol Hill Hearings June 22, 2024

For them. But that is an a direct attack. Host bill in lynchburg, virginia. Caller to me, people claim that the Second Amendment is the most important thing. The right to vote is the most important thing right that we have, and republicans are doing everything they can, all over the country, to try to make it harder and harder for people to vote. We have holidays for everything, but the day that we elect the president or a congressman or something, many people cannot get there to vote and they are trying to make it even harder. To me that is the most important thing that we have in our constitution, is that right to vote. They do so much. Bill, what do you think about early voting, as well as a day off . Voting, they have tried to present that in some states they are working some have early voting. They make it difficult to get absentee ballots, you have to give some special cases are outright lie to get one. Now in virginia where they are oath,g about the loyalty i have another comment on that. That again is to keep people from both from voting from some for someone else. That is a violation of the right to vote for whoever. Host that will be our last call and open phones. Thanks everybody. We will be back tomorrow morning at 10 ago a. M. Eastern time, but first we want to bring you to brookingking institution. They are holding a forum on access to Financial Services across the globe. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [indiscernible] again we are live here at the Brookings Institution for research into banking access in various countries and how technology can expand this access. It should get underway in just a moment. [indiscernible] good morning. I am gerald webb west. You to like to welcome this forum on Financial Inclusion. We are webcasting this event live, so i would like to welcome our viewers from around the world, and for those of you who are wishing to post comments or questions during the forum, we have set up a twitter feed at financialinclusion. We would welcome any comments that you have on that. About 2 there are billion individuals who do not have Bank Accounts. This obviously makes it difficult for them to Access Financial services, pay bills, or transfer money to friends and relatives. In addition, it is hard to be an object and are in that situation , when you are outside the formal financial system, it is difficult to gain access to capital or two for businesses when you do not have access to basic Financial Services. That manyod news is nations around the world have made commitments to expanding. Inancial services for the poor a number have signed my declaration on Financial Inclusion, have pledged to recognize the importance of inclusion, develop a Financial Inclusion policy, and implement it Regulatory Frameworks that encourage inclusion. The firstre launching scorecard,kings measuring progress on Financial Access and usage. With the Financial Support of the bill and Melinda Gates foundation we have embarked on a threeyear study of inclusion in 21 developing countries. A short summary of our analysis is that Financial Inclusion is taking off. There has been a surge in access to Financial Services, this is happening through mobile money, nonbank providers, and digital Financial Services. Africa is leading the charge in area. Ea in this four of the top five countries in our ranking are in africa. There is a lot of exciting and innovative efforts taken place here. We have a short video that captures more about this project. It is two minutes in length, so we are going to roll that video and then we will go from there. [video clip] about 2 billion adults around the world do not have access to Financial Services. This is where the idea of Financial Inclusion comes into play. This Product Research 21 economically diverse countries to develop ideas to broaden access to Financial Services. 4 dimensionsor of inclusion. Country commitment, mobile but also through Innovative Digital Services like my mobile money accounts. Mobile money is a lifeline for millions of under banked people in places where access to Traditional Banks is limited. People can use a mobile find to pay for goods and services, receive the funds, and Access Financial services. This is running away for developing countries to grow their economies. Tanzania has 95 million mobile transactions per month. It became one of the first country to connect them, allowing them to easily send money to people on a different network. 2013, 73 of brazilians live within five kilometers of the Financial Services institution. In india, ang subsidy for liquefied Petroleum Gas has delivered 2 billion to Bank Accounts. Saveatives like these can the government money and help individuals receive funds more securely and reliably. To see where the nations we evaluated right on our scorecard, go here. Our project seeks to answer three questions. Do country commitments make a difference in terms of project progress towards Financial Inclusion . Do to what extent do mobile technologies advance inclusion . And what legal policy and regulatory approaches do the best job of promoting Financial Inclusion . So we analyzed inclusion in nearly two dozen different nations. That includes places such as brazil, colombia, india, indonesia, kenya, south africa, tanzania, among other places. This week we have published our scorecard and our report. There are Copies Available for those of you who are here in the auditorium. Are those who are watching the webcast you can download our report that broo kings. Edu fdip. This is the first of three annual reports, so we would welcome any input that you have. Be thinking about our methodology, our indicators, and our recommendations in terms of future reports. We would like to hear any suggestions you have. Commentst detailed from every country that we included in our report. We also talked with many leaders in the world were active on Financial Inclusion, and we are very grateful for their suggestions. To give you a sense of the highlights of our study, my colleague will summarize the key findings. Is a nonresident senior fellow at brookings and a professor of electrical engineering, public policy, and management at ucla. He has an extensively on technology, Financial Inclusion, and developing world. And then after johns presentation we will hear from several experts who will offer their suggestions on how to improve Financial Inclusion around the world. I will turn it over to john. Thanks to all of you. I know that there are many things you could be doing on this absolutely gorgeous day here in washington, or if youre somewhere else in the world, there are also other things you could be doing. We are very appreciative that you would take some time out of your day to be with us. Im going to spend about eight to 10 minutes going over some of the highlights from the study. Just to echo what was explained a moment ago, the objective is to evaluate Financial Inclusion as well as the progress in each of 21 countries. You can see the list of 21 countries appear. I wont read through them all. But one kind of overarching characteristic you will hopefully notice is that this is a very Diverse Group of countries. It is diverse economically, geographically, politically. We have some small countries there. We have some enormous countries like india. We chose a list like this because the cells by casting a wide net and looking across a broad array of countries. We are not limiting ourselves for example to only one region of the world. These are the overall scorecard top. Ts, ranks from kenya, sepp blatter, brazil, rwanda, and uganda. These are the overall scores. We also ranked each of these countries through each of four dimensions. To measure Financial Inclusion we identified four key dimensions. One is country commitments. The second is mobile capacity. The third is regulatory environment, and the fourth is adoption. Scores forregated all of these together to come up with the overall score. In this in the report you can see the breakdown. So for example, on the adoption dimension we were fortunate to be able to have access to the data from the world banks global index which just came out a few months ago, and for some of the other dimensions we drew from a number of other data sources. Some overarching observations. Countries are making really progress. There is really good news on that front if you look to where things stand today versus where they stood not too many years ago. There has been enormous growth, for example, in a number of mobile money deployments, which are really playing a fundamental role in many jurisdictions. We see clearly there are multiple pathways to Financial Inclusion. In some countries, for example that is,bile money using mobile phones as a platform for transactions has been an absolutely fundamental part of the inclusion story. But another places, for example in south america, where there is a very welldeveloped , the banks canks that extend their reach by sort of Correspondent Banking associated with other industries that can allow people to have Banking Services closer to their residence or their workplace. That model has worked very well in south america, and mobile money we have seen less penetration of mobile money and south america. There is really no onesizefitsall. There are multiple ways to provide inclusion, and the good news is were seeing Good Progress on multiple pathways. Is throughbservation our study we did emphasize and take a very close look at bank and nonbank Service Providers. We believe that these are increasingly important mechanisms for financial of theon, just because complexity of the geography and the infrastructure in many places. It will be a very long time, if ever, before you will see Traditional Bank branches, brickandmortar, in many of these smaller villages and towns in some of these countries. Whereas of course, many of these places are covered or will soon by very goodg mobile phone service. That allows that service to be a platform for financial transactions. I will summarize five key findings. One, country commitments matter. There are multinational Financial Inclusion networks such as the alliance for Financial Inclusion, which mild declaration through that. Countries that signed up for the minor declaration are in many cases making good on commitments associated with that. There are countries that joined the better than Cash Alliance, which has also being a critically Important Organization for promoting Financial Inclusion. Countries that actively engage , in those sorts of networks general, we found that those networks are extremely important and extremely effective in promoting inclusion. Secondly, digital Financial Services can accelerate Financial Inclusion. Advantagesnormous manyiated with digital in environments, including in Financial Services. This is not mean there are not also concerns, for example cyber security. But for now we believe the Digital Financial transactions offer enormous advantages in terms of security, efficiency, cost efficiency. As those digital Financial Services become more common, we believe that we will have positive feedback with respect to promoting Financial Inclusion. Generallygraphy matters less than policy, legal, and regulatory changes. That said, we still observe some regional trends. For example as i mentioned, you see mobile money being much more common in places that lack much of a Traditional Banking , whereas with places with a more traditional interceptor you see mobile money playing less of a central role and banking correspondents play more of a central role. Fourth, poor nation key players is really important. Clearly if you are looking at Something Like mobile money, that impacts clearly the telecommunications industry, but also it impacts banks and ministries of finance, and things like that. That are complex questions his government and regulatory bodies, and so on, when you are trying to make sure that these services can be provided, available at reasonable cost, and, critically, can be interoperable. For example, a consumer is not locked solely into sending or receiving money from people that happen to be customers of the same mobile phone. Whererdination is an area it is extremely poor and for governments and the private sector to be engaged. Last but certainly not least, full Financial Inclusion cannot be achieved without addressing the gender gap. We are certainly not the first to recognize this. It is well recognized, that there is a persistent and significant gender gap, under which women are often significantly more excluded from global Financial Services than men. And of course you cannot have full Financial Inclusion unless you have Financial Inclusion for everybody, including women. So closing the gender gap, which unfortunately has not significant we appeared to close in the last couple of years in general, is something that is really important. The final point i will mention here is that it is important to account for diverse cultural contexts. To bring countries have different sorts of interceptors. I will give an example. In the philippines on jobs have become very important physical pawnshops. You can go to a poncho and they will transfer money to someone else in the philippines. Different countries have different infrastructure that can be leveraged to deliver Financial Services. What works in one place may not necessarily be accurate applicable in another place. Moving forward, as theyre all mentioned, we are just completing the first year of a threeyear project. We are going to be publishing an annual report at the end of the year. We started this project one year ago, the report that we published this week is the first of those reports. We plan to publish another report a year from now, and then a third report a year after that. We are very interested in continuing to foster dialogue among the many very active in critically Important Organizations, which includes not only private Sector Companies and organizations like the alliance for Financial Inclusion and of course the governments themselves that are trying to work to promote. Inancial inclusion i will close by mentioning that we welcome feedback. We want feedback. Anytime you try to devise a scoring system there are choices that you make. It is impossible to design a system that is perfect. We think that we have done a reasonably good job, but we are also confident that we can do a better job. We would welcome feedback from the community on ways that we can improve our methodology and our analysis in the future. So that we can have an even better product as we continue with this project. We are also considering expanding the scope of a number of countries, beyond the 21 that we have identified in this first report. Onwould welcome suggestions countries with people in the community believe are particularly important for us to consider in future rounds of the study. With that i will move on, and i will ask our moderator and our panelists to come up, and we will have what i am sure will be a very interesting discussion on Financial Inclusion. Thank you ray much for your time. Thank you very much for your time. [applause] thank you. Im just looking out at a very long and skinny room. I am already seeing one of my challenges today, which is going to be spotting you guys in the back. We are going to make you participate actively in this. Were going to take the classroom approach. The world sean, i am trade editor of the financial times. Washingtonnomics for and i am very interested in development and things like Financial Inclusion. Thats something ive been one of the many things i have been learning a lot about. Ourved in january from headquarters in london. Im very happy to be a. To be up here moderating this discussion. Also as i learned over the last few days, i am the stranger

© 2025 Vimarsana