FINANCE WITH A PURPOSE

From vehicles to music, power generation to retail, every aspect of our daily routine has experienced drastic changes in the recent past, driven by secular forces such as digitization, a growing focus on sustainability, regulatory changes and evolving consumer behavior. Financial services are no exception. A paradigm change is at play in the financial sector, with a surge in competition from non-traditional actors, a revolution in customer experience evidenced by rising transparency and customer-centric strategies. FinTech is disrupting financial services, providing a historic opportunity for formally underserved customers, a formidable threat to existing banks and a critical challenge to regulators. Through the lens of FinTech (financial technology) — including payments, lending platforms, insurtech, superapps and market infrastructure — the author highlights the practical policy opportunities and risks of financial inclusion with a wealth of data.

This book tells the story of entrepreneurs, companies, investors, researchers and regulators who are building the financial services of tomorrow and the mechanisms that will allow us as a society to fulfill the promise of inclusion. There are still challenges to overcome, particularly high levels of informality, subpar quality in financial services, and low levels of financial education. Regulators play a crucial role to foster inclusion, proposing sandboxes and stepping up their efforts against risks triggered by technology such as monopolistic behavior, consumer protection and cybercrime.

Finance with a Purpose combines the theory in the fields of economics, finance and law with the practice of financial institutions, corporates, households and investors. By combining the latest academic research with ample professional experience in emerging markets, this book is essential for policymakers, scholars, and any reader who wants to understand the recent progress in financial inclusion and how it can be used to alleviate inequality and foster economic development.

Contents:

• Introduction: Financial Disruption with a Purpose
• The Promise of Open Banking
• Benefits and Limits of Financial Inclusion
• Microcredit 15 Years After the Nobel Prize
• Electronic Payments as Entry Point for Inclusion
• Cryptocurrencies: A Natural Evolution for Payments?
• The End of Branches as We Know Them
• Using Data While Respecting Customers' Rights
• How Can Regulators Foster Inclusion?
• Finance Without Banks?
• Conclusion: The Way Forward
• List of Figures
• List of Tables

Readership: Advanced undergraduate and graduate students, researchers and practitioners in the fields of FinTech, strategic innovation, banking, microfinance, development economics and banking regulation.

Key Features:

• The book combines the latest theoretical understanding of financial services, especially on finTech and inclusion, together with first-hand experience on those topics
• Written by a practitioner with close to 20 years of experience in the field, on three continents, with both global investment banks and theoretical research