Next, a look at how Digital Technologies have impacted Financial Inclusion in the u. S. And abroad. Researchers at the Brookings Institution spoke about the data followed by a panel on the challenges that still exist. This is just under 90 minutes. Good morning. Im gerald west, Vice President of government stud sxwriz director of the center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. And i would like to welcome you to our forum on Financial Inclusion. And we are webcasting this event live. So wed like to welcome our viewe viewers. And also those of you who have tuned in via cspan. For those of you who are wishing to post comments, during the forum we have set up a twitter feed at financialinclusion. Thats financialinclusion. So youre welcome to make any comments that you would like. So there are nearly 2 billion adults globally who do not have bank accounts. This makes it very difficult to Access Financial services, pay bills, or transfer money to relatives. In addition, it is hard in those circumstances to be an entrepreneur when you are outside the formal Financial System. Its difficult to gain access to capital or form a business when you lack basic Financial Services. But the good news is that many nations have made commitments to expanding Financial Services for the poor. They understand that Financial Inclusion is vital to Economic Development and social inclusion. And so as a result they are developing Financial Inclusion policies and implementing a new framework that encourages inclusion. So today ryan lewis, John Villasenor, and myself are launching our third annual brookings scorecard measuring progress on Financial Access and usage with the support of the bill and Melinda Gates foundation. Weve embarked on a threeyear study of inclusion in 26 developing countries. The short summary is that weve seen progress on Financial Services in many places. There are efforts to help marginalize populations. And this is happening through mobile money and digital Financial Services. As part of our research we got detailed suggestions from every country. Weve also talked with many leaders in the Ngo Community who are active on Financial Inclusion and were grateful for their sxurpt their help along the way. To give you a more detailed sense of the highlights of our study my colleague robin lewis will summarize the key findings. Rob zinn a Research Analyst and a social fellow at brookings with our center for Technology Innovation. So with that i will turn it over to robin. Good morning. Thank you to darryl for those remarks. And our sincere thanks to all of you for joining us this morning. Either here at brookings or via livellstream. We are very grateful for your interest in the project, and im looking forward to providing a brief overview of our approach and key findings before we turn it over to the panel discussion. So first id like to start with a brief overview of our project. The financial and Digital Inclusion project was launched in the summer of 2014. The purpose of the project is to provide policy makers, private sector representatives, nongovernmental organizations and the general public with information that can help improve Financial Inclusion in the focus countries and around the world. But why does Financial Inclusion matter . At the individual level Financial Inclusion matters because it provides pathways for people to improve their financial health, which contributes to their overall wellbeing. Beyond that it is a key ingredient in advancing Sustainable Development goals such as Poverty Reduction and gender equality. To support our overall objective, over the past three years we have selected a series of politically, economically, and geographically diverse countries and we have evaluated their progress toward Financial Inclusion through a series of annual reports as well as conversations with diverse groups of experts. So lets talk briefly about the reports that we are launching today. This is the third annual afdip reports. And as with the first two reports, we examined access to usage of formal Financial Services across diverse country contacts. So when i say normal Financial Services, we primarily focused on basic Services Since these are often entry points to the formal Financial System including savings accounts and government to person transfers. For the 2017 report we have distilled and updated the Country Profiles that we featured in 2015 and 2016. And in addition to these selected Financial Inclusion highlights and recent updates we have included some recommendations regarding key next steps for examining Financial Inclusion. Given the scope of our sample and the rapidly evolving nature of the issue of Financial Inclusion around the world these lists are not exhaustive but we do believe they capture an important snapshot of Key Development and opportunities for future growth. So moving to a quick scorecard interview as gerald mentioned, one of the components of our report informed by our research on each countrys landscape is a scorecard tool. To develop the scorecard we identified four dimensions of Financial Inclusion including country commitment, Regulatory Environment, and the adoption of formal Financial Services. So in terms of our country sample, we maintain the same list as in the Previous Year in which we added five new countries to diversify our sample. These countries included the dominican republic, egypt, el salvador, haiti, and vietnam. So we will dive into the dimension level findings very shortly, but for the moment here is our preview of the 2017 afdip scorecard. As you can see, the top scoring countries are generally distributed across latin america and subsaharan africa. Although countries in other regions including the philippines also demonstrated strong performances as well. For the third year in a row kenya received the top place on our scorecard, in part due to its robust commitment to advancing Financial Inclusion as well as Widespread Adoption of mobile Money Services. With that said, a number of other top scoring countries including several in latin america have experienced lower levels of mobile Money Adoption to date but often have robust takeup of innovative cardbased services as well as nontraditional Access Points such as banking correspondence. We think this finding should be very encouraging to the Financial Inclusion community because it demonstrates that countries with different political, economic, and geographic environments can effectively pursue different pathways for advancing Financial Inclusion. So to provide a better sense of what factors inform these scores, well briefly walk through some of the indicators across the four dimensions before we explore our findings. For example, country commitment indicators include the existence of comprehensive national Financial Inclusion strategies as well as specific dpinl inclusion protection frameworks. Excuse me, Consumer Protection frameworks. So these indicators help give us the sense of whether countries are willing to work collaboratively across sectors to make engagement to engagement with formal Financial Services a priority. Moving to mobile capacity, we measured this because it includes indicators related to mobile infrastructure as well as the number and type of mobile Money Services that are offered. Now, while digital Financial Inclusion services extend far beyond mobile money, these offerings can provide a very convenient, affordable platform for those who are typically underserved to Access Financial services. Moving briefly to Regulatory Environments. We look at whether regulations, policies or other guidance concerning electronic money and other digital Financial Services have been issued. We also look at issues such as mobile platform interoperability, which basically looks into whether customers of one service can easily send money to customers of another mobile money service. Finally we focused on account adoption with both more Traditional Financial Service Providers as well as mobile money priefrtds across underserved groups in particular. These groups may include lower income adults as well as women. All the daya is from the world banks global data base and we look forward to updating the data as the new data is released. Moving to the key findings, the first country commitment to mention and touch on a few examples of countries progress. For example, mexico increased its overall score by five Percentage Points this year to join the top five scoring countries. A couple of the changes that prompted this increase include that in june of 2017 the National Council on Financial Inclusion released the national Financial Inclusion plan. The government of mexico also joined the united nationsbased better than cash alliance. Moving to mobile capacity, el salvador is an example of a country that boosted its score by five Percentage Points over the last year, partly by increasing adoption of smartphones which can provide a more convenient and accessible way for individuals to access mobile Financial Services. Moving to Regulatory Environments, countries from across all of our Major Regions had strong performances on this component of the scorecard including peru, the philippines, rwan rwanda, and india, which all received the highest scores possible under the Regulatory Environment dimension. For example, in addition to promoting mobile money interon rahability india has licensed several entities as payment banks which effectively is hoped to increase Financial Access points for underserved individuals. Next lets move to our adoption findings. The data and metrics on the adoption of traditional and Financial Services are existent from last year. And so among the new afdip countries added in 2016 which received the highest adoption score among those new countries. Now lets turn to some of the key findings and calls to action in this years report. So across our afdip countries one encouraging finding is theres been considerable growth, recognition that Financial Inclusion is not only important for individuals of welfare but it can also contribute to Macro Economic growth and Sustainable Development goals including the ones i mentioned previously. One Interesting Data point on this front is that as of this year all of the countries in our sample are members of Financial Inclusionoriented groups or networks. While membership in these groups is important and valuable. We also need concrete steps to emerge from their engagement. This is where Infrastructure Investment and the regulatory xhoens of this scorecard come into play. In addition, we also need consistent detailed data to track progress toward these goals. One example of something thaen ables countries to do nas the alliance for Financial Inclusion new data portal which is a helpful platform and we hope more countries will take the opportunity to include timely detailed data that is available for public consumption in order to help with knowledge, sharing, and accountability. Moving to our next key finding, syntec, which is essentially the intersection of finance and technology, provides 2re78ds opportunity to accelerate progress toward Financial Inclusion. So basically, syntac involves the innovative use of technology to both design and deliver Financial Services on products. And if that sounds like a really broad catchall term, thats because it is. But this can help enhance the accessibility and the utility of Financial Services for consumers. And render the deployment of these services more Cost Effective for providers. So for example, in a report bb vancoma is working with a chilean bank to extend credit to individuals who may not have a typical Credit History that they have established. Were excited about these kinds of developments because they not only enable customers to Access Financial services but they can also help it become more accessible for individuals to use these services and intuitive. So how are some countries taking synt krachlt into account . One example is in indonesia where as of august 2016 the Financial Services authority provided an outline of guidelines for the local syntac industry. Additionally, in south africa syntac is increasingly pref sxlent a syntac Regulatory Framework is expected to form the Financial Institutions bill in 2017. Finally, we encourage companies to amplify investments in cybersecurity efforts and knowledge sharing in order to fully reap the benefits of Financial Services innovation. So with the proliferation of Digital Technologies boundaries are blurring across Traditional Financial Service Providers and as well as Tech Startups and other groups. So while many of these companies are very animal sxbl Cost Effective effective he they may also not have the infrastructure, resources or experience to ensure the services they provide are safe and secure. With that said of course banks are not exempt from this. Particularly when they have outdated or centralized systems. So in a conversation with many stakeholders that we had in february of this year, one suggestion that emerged was from policy makers as well as Financial Service providers to work with technical experts to essentially provide us options to enhance cybersecurity and provide Technical Assistance for implementi ining those solution. Moving forward we look forward to hearing from all of you regarding this years report and scorecard as well as the 2015 and 2016 report. And we will continue our efforts to facilitate dialogue regarding important Financial Inclusion developments and the outcomes of the scorecard. We have an adjustment up here. Active comments at brookings. Edu where we welcome your feedback. And now thank you for listening to the presentation. And i would like to invite our moderator John Villasenor as well as our distinguished panelists to the stage to share their perspectives on Financial Inclusion. [ applause ] okay. Thank you very much to darryl west and robin lewis for setting the stage here. And thanks to all of you for taking time out of what im sure is a very busy schedule to help us with the dialogue on this really important topic.