| Resumen: |
magine a life without access to financial services: no deposit account, no debit card,
no fire insurance, no college savings plan, no home mortgage. Life would be an
incredibly stressful roller coaster ride, and most dreams would remain unfulfilled.
The day you get paid for work would be good, the other days rough. Any accident
would set your family back. Sending the kids to college? Too difficult. Buying a
house? Forget it. Nobody can pay for such needs out of cash accumulated under the
mattress. For us, life without access to financial services is unimaginable.
Yet according to 2011 data from the World Bank, an estimated 2.5 billion
working-age adults globally—more than half of the total adult population—have to
do exactly that. They live a life without access to the types of financial services we
take for granted. Of course, they cannot do without financial intermediation, so they
rely on age-old, informal mechanisms. They buy livestock as a form of savings; they
throw a village feast to cement local ties as insurance against a future family crisis;
they pawn jewelry to satisfy urgent liquidity needs; and they turn to a moneylender
for credit. These mechanisms are risky and often very expensive.
Increasingly robust empirical evidence demonstrates how appropriate finan
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cial services can help to improve household welfare and spur small enterprise
activity. Macro evidence also shows that economies with deeper financial inter
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mediation and better access to financial services grow faster and have less income
inequality. Policy makers and regulators worldwide recognize these connections.
They have made financial inclusion—where everyone has the choice to access and
use the financial services they need, delivered in a responsible fashion—a global
development priority.
A powerful vision of responsible financial market development is
emerging—a
vision that aims to bank the other half of the global working-age adult population
by leveraging what we have learned from the microfinance story to date, using
advances in technology to spur product and business model innovation, and
encouraging new ways of thinking about how to create an enabling, risk-
proportionate regulatory and supervisory environment. |
