Despite the benefits brought by digital financial services and the efforts made to increasingly digitize cash transactions, there are still significant challenges to quickly and effectively leveraging ICT to meaningfully enhance financial inclusion. The full potential of mobile money has not yet been achieved, with 2 billion people in developing countries still lacking a viable alternative to the cash economy and informal financial services. 1.7 billion of them have mobile phones, but the industry has found it challenging to launch and scale services for the unbanked because many policy and regulatory environments are not genuinely enabling yet.
In this respect, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has set up the Focus Group on Digital Financial Services (FG DFS) in June 2014. The Focus Group Digital Financial Services, incorporating 60 organizations from some 30 countries, aims to bridge the gap between telecommunications and financial services regulators, and the private and public sectors. Representatives from across the DFS ecosystem are addressing some of the major issues currently preventing DFS from serving the unbanked ranging from interoperability, consumer protection, competition issues, regulation for DFS, security of transaction, quality of service, big data and digital identity. It is the unique forum which brings together regulators and players from both the telecommunication and financial services sectors.