Special Events:
APPAM Communities: FinTech for Financial Inclusion (F4F)
In the financial services industry, nations, investors, policymakers, incumbent financial service providers, multilateral agencies, and family offices are playing attention to technological innovations and FinTech activities more than ever. What is important to these stakeholders is the consideration on how technical changes in financial service could possibly affect low- and moderate-income households and small -medium enterprises. Of equal importance are the potential risks ranging from data breaches, cyber-attacks, and privacy threats that first-time users of digital financial services are susceptible to. Also, how would national legislatures and regulators respond to institutional changes in financial services with increasing entry of technology-based non-bank firms? These are pertinent research themes that are relevant to FinTech and Financial Inclusion.
Unsurprisingly, stakeholders are betting on FinTech to extend access to the unbanked and underserved population. While academic research on FinTech is at an early stage, there is a knowledge gap on how nations, regulators and FinTech entrepreneurs should close in on financial inclusion. Unarguably, this calls for more academic research.
Given this research challenge and growing policy attention to FinTech for Financial Inclusion (F4F), this affinity group will be a cooperative learning environment to encourage productive research on FinTech for underserved. This affinity group will serve as a platform to attract PhD students, early-career and experienced faculty with interest in this policy -relevant research theme to share, engage, collaborate and network. Hopefully, the research outcomes will help policymakers, businesses and investors to better understand how FinTech can improve economic well-being of the underserved.
