Chea Serey, assistant governor and director general of the National Bank of Cambodia discusses the development of the newly launched Bakong payment system, the first in the world to be built on distributed ledger technology and how it brings the formal financial system comprising licensed commercial banks, microfinance institutions, and payment service providers together on a single interoperable platform that connects users directly to drive financial inclusion

Konstantin Peric, deputy director, Financial Services for the Poor at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, advances the foundation’s goal to increase digital usage for financial inclusion and create a payments platform for 1.7 billion people who remain unserved globally.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation aims to provide assistance to unbanked people to lead productive lives especially in developing countries. Based in Seattle, Washington, the foundation is led by Mark Suzman, CEO, under the direction of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.

The total direct grantee support in 2019 was $5.1 billion which includes grant payments and direct charitable contracts but not programme-related investments. The foundation spent around $130 million worth of funds last year for financial services for the poor.

Patrick Liu of Fusion Bank shared that as a virtual bank, it is vital to have adequate security controls and mitigation plans to protect customers.

Ricky Woo of DBS Bank, on the other hand, emphasised the importance of governance structure and processes in reviewing partners and third-party risks in open banking and customer-centric ecosystems.

In addition, Sumit Agarwal of F5 highlighted the use of a contrarian perspective in viewing standard metrics as imposed friction on users.

Key points include:

• Convergence brings together existing silos inside organisations, which results in better communication and data sharing in identifying risks and preventing fraud

• Among evolving regulatory requirements, discussions among business teams are vital to ensure alignment in understanding the operational impact of various security solutions

• A contrarian metric is the core of an innovative approach in redesigning products and systems

• Security practitioners should go more the way of business when discussing and explaining about security and fraud issues

The first RadioFinance virtual roundtable saw the participation of 15 digital finance practitioners sharing insights on the future of the industry post COVID.

Industry experts discussed how the pandemic has altered the digital finance landscape and how the future of financial services could look like. They debated how technology and ecosystems ultimately reshape the customer journey and shift institutions’ priorities.

Key points in the discussion include:

COVID-19 has disrupted and accelerated the industry's digital transformation agenda

Significant disruption to consumer-facing and lending fintechs while B2B and technology infrastructure players see uptick

Institutions must reconfigure technology stacks to better leverage data and connect to customer-relevant ecosystems

Ecosystems are designed around customers, not products or institutions

Success requires capital, scale and understanding cost and unit economics

Operational security and resilience necessary to safeguard customer trust and engagement

The following key points were discussed during the interview:

Sarafu network comes from an aid perspective but does not follow a top-down approach, instead it develops the community by tapping its own resources

The alternative community currency provides liquidity based on a voucher or a promissory note against future production

The programme creates stable markets based on local development and trust

While the concept has worked well in rural areas or communities that have strong and basic institutions, its implementation in urban settings was quite a challenge

Blockchain technology provides underlying protocols that allow community currencies to trade with each other directly and maintain collateral in national currency-pegged assets

Investments and donations provide funding that lead to the development of local industries and infrastructure

Community currency programmes increase local productivity and help directly develop the local economy

As a socio-economic development tool, community currency offers an innovative way to improve living standards of the poor

In this RadioFinance session, we looked at economic recovery scenarios post-pandemic. John Gong, professor of economics at the University of International Business and Economics, shared how history shows possible outcomes to the crisis, with economies experiencing rebounds and a period of boom after recessions.

Charles Bean, former deputy governor for monetary policy at the Bank of England, emphasised that recovery pace depends on both government decisions and consumer behaviour. On the other hand, Taimur Baig, managing director and chief economist at DBS Bank, stressed that although stimulus measures help economies, short-term “band aid” solutions will be ineffective and may stagger recovery process, causing longer term damage. Post-pandemic policies will also define economic trajectory.

The key points that emerged from the discussion were:

• Governments focus on funding SMEs and creating jobs to re-energise the economy

• Chinese authorities are channelling resources to the ‘consumption’ side of the economy, with a focus on upgrading soft infrastructure such as the rollout of 5G services

• Markets are pricing in a deglobalisation bias, with elements such as cost-push inflation and lower returns to capital, but these fail to show in numbers

• Business models will change as companies undergo structural and operational transformations

@Bill Reichert, managing director and co-founder of @Garage Technology Ventures discussed the evolution of venture capitalism and how COVID-19 has impacted long-term investment so far with @Emmanuel Daniel.

Key points in the discussion include:

• Understanding underlying valuation drivers and trends in the VC market

• Disruptive digital and software technologies and their disproportionate impact on pricing

• COVID-19 - Impact and opportunities in new sectors and around the globe

The full transcript and video of the interview are available on:

RadioFinance: https://bit.ly/39B4B5d

In this session, Martin McCann, co-founder of Trade Ledger; Flemming Bengtsen, founder of Nimbla; and Gabriele Sabato, co-founder of Wiserfunding, discussed with Emmanuel Daniel how innovations in financial technology are speeding up the release of government-guaranteed SME loans in UK and the creation of new lending models.

The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing the shift to digitalisation and cashless transactions. Companies that had the foresight and will to prepare for this are now in a prime position to exploit the opportunities being presented, and it doesn’t matter if they are operating in emerging Pakistan or in highly developed Singapore. Amsterdam-based telco VEON is one such company. Sergi Herrero, Co-CEO at the Nasdaq-traded VEON, discussed in this RadioFinance session with Emmanuel Daniel the company’s growth strategy anchored on three areas: financial services, content and big data.

Please visit the link for the full video: https://bit.ly/2VHJ1Gy

“Many banks lack agility to respond to emerging financial frauds”

In this RadioFinance session on financial crime in the time of COVID-19. our guests, Dutch Police’s Roeland van Zeijst discussing organised crime groups pivoting to cybercrime. Barclays’s Richard Carrick emphasised the importance of financial institutions’ (FIs) greater adoption of data analytics and AI to adapt to challenges, including those posed by the pandemic. Bank Mandiri’s Anzar Mulyantoro highlighted the challenges FIs face regarding financial crime and anti-money laundering. GBG’s Michelle Weatherhead explained how institutions can leverage emerging technologies to protect their customers, employees and businesses against cyber-attacks.

The discussion also revolved around these main points:

• The COVID-19 pandemic and other new crises that change peoples’ behaviours trigger the evolution of financial crime and its profile

• Many FIs lack the agility to respond quickly and counter rising threats

• Public-private partnerships as well as industry-level information sharing are critical in detecting and countering emerging forms of financial crimes

• Technologies that employ AI and machine learning – which agile fintech and regtech players typically have – are effective at enabling an intelligence-based defence against financial crimes