NAIROBI: Malaysia has been singled out by the head of an international alliance of financial policymakers as an example for other countries to emulate in efforts to promote financial inclusion. Malaysia was cited on Tuesday by Alfred Hannig, the executive director of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI),a global network of financial policymakers from developing and emerging countries working together to increase access to appropriate financial services for the poor. Briefing the media before the start of the 4th Global Policy Forum which begins here here Wednesday, Hannig said improving inclusion to financial services involved improving the range of services which the poor could access and ensuring that these were affordable to lower-income groups. He pointed to Malaysia's central bank as an example for other countries, in that it had recently put in place measures to ensure that banks and financial service providers improved the transparency of their pricing and also acted to follow up on complaints lodged by consumers. Hannig also said that mobile finance was the future, pointing to Kenya where the number of mobile money users had mushroomed from 11 million to 90 million users between 2010 and the end of last year. The Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of the Philippines, Nestor Espenilla, said his country, where two out of 10 households remain unbanked, was focusing on developing financial services through cellular networks, especially as 90 percent of Filipinos had cellphones. Government and central bank delegates from over 80 countries will be meeting in Cape Town Wednesday and Thursday at the 4th Global Policy Forum. Hannig expected that by the end of the week, more than 30 countries would have made tangible commitments towards increasing the size of the banked population. This year's forum will see participants working to strengthen regional co-operation groups, with deliberations at the African regional group expected to focus on plans for the newly Mobile Financial Services Policy Initiative (AMPI). Participants at this year's conference are also expected to report back on commitments put into place following last year's Global Policy Forum in Mexico, where the AFI launched the Maya Declaration, a set of global measurable financial inclusion commitments by developing countries. The Director-General of South Africa's National Treasury, Lungisa Fuzile, said South Africa had not yet signed the declaration, but intended to do so soon. He also said that if South Africa was to lubricate its real economy it must ensure that more people could access affordable and easy-to-understand banking and other financial services from formal sector providers. Fuzile said if more people were not banked, the risk was that more informal operators, which were not regulated and which charged significant fees and interest rates for those who accessd their service, would spring up.
