On 25 October 2021, Nigeria became the second country in the world, and the first in Africa, to launch a central bank digital currency. Launched with the tag line “Same Naira. More possibilities”, the Central Bank of Nigeria publicized the eNaira as having the capability to deepen financial inclusion, reduce the cost of financial transactions and support a more efficient payment system. However, more than one year after its launch, its usage is yet to gain a critical mass. This article identifies the significant challenges that make the eNaira unacceptable and potentially ineffective. First, its status as legal tender is questionable; secondly, it undermines privacy, a critical component of physical cash. Thirdly, it is incapable of wide acceptance by individuals and entities across Nigeria. The article explains each of these challenges and proposes a roadmap to the eNaira's acceptance and effectiveness.

This paper examines global data on unbanked and underbanked consumers to highlight the role improved financial literacy and capability could play in motivating and enabling the safe and beneficial use of financial services. The paper uses Global Findex data, a demand-side survey on ownership and use of accounts at formal financial institutions, such as a bank or similar financial institution, or a mobile money service provider. The paper reviews the self-reported barriers to account ownership and use cited by unbanked adults and identifies the challenges faced by account owners who could not use an account without help. Together, these issues point to the importance of financial education to improve digital and financial literacy skills, in addition to product design that considers customer abilities, and strong consumer safeguards to ensure that customers benefit from financial access.

Financial inclusion depends on providing adjusted services for citizens with disclosed vulnerabilities. At the same time, the financial industry needs to adhere to a strict regulatory framework, which is often in conflict with the desire for inclusive, adaptive, and privacy-preserving services. In this article we study how this tension impacts the deployment of privacy-sensitive technologies aimed at financial inclusion. We conduct a qualitative study with banking experts to understand their perspectives on service development for financial inclusion. We build and demonstrate a prototype solution based on open source decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials software and report on feedback from the banking experts on this system. The technology is promising thanks to its selective disclosure of vulnerabilities to the full control of the individual. This supports GDPR requirements, but at the same time, there is a clear tension between introducing these technologies and fulfilling other regulatory requirements, particularly with respect to “Know Your Customer.” We consider the policy implications stemming from these tensions and provide guidelines for the further design of related technologies.

This paper purports to study the enormous proliferation of fintech online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending in Indonesia, along with their risks and the prevailing regulations of fintech online P2P lending. This article also suggests a varied spectrum of regulatory actions for regulating online P2P lending as an approach to increase consumer protection and stimulate the growth of Indonesia’s financial inclusion. It highlights the regulative risks and challenges of fintech online P2P lending in Indonesia and has discovered various spectra of regulatory responses that the Indonesian government can practise to regulate this potential industry. Solid recommendations were also given to regulators to better develop the present regulatory framework. This paper adds to the literature on the prevailing practice of online P2P lending by offering a legal outlook involving legal protection and the newly emerging fintech industry from an Indonesian context.

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and women's participation in peace processes are strongly supported by states. Yet financing to support the implementation of WPS has lagged behind overt international commitments to the agenda. WPS scholars and practitioners have highlighted the funding shortfalls for enabling WPS implementation and continued under-investment in gender-inclusive peace. In this article, we ask how much are donor states financially backing the implementation of gender-inclusive peace agreements which they promote? We use a high ambiguity-conflict model of policy implementation to explore the mechanisms of bilateral and multilateral financing for gender-inclusive peace. We trace to what extent international investments are supporting specific gender provisions in two progressive gender-inclusive peace processes, the 2016 Colombian Peace Agreement and 2015 Comprehensive Peace Agreement in the Philippines. In both case studies, we reveal a drastic gap between the international donor rhetoric and the funding. Patterns of financial investment do not follow nor support the life cycle of inclusive peace processes. We suggest key strategies for further research to address this policy and recommend that all gender provisions of peace agreements be monitored in-country and all gender-responsive investments be tracked and evaluated.

In the digital age, financial inclusion continues to be connected to social inclusion. While most personal financial transactions are shifting from cash currency to digital transactions, we must ensure that marginalized members of society are not unbanked and excluded from financial opportunities. Many countries are declaring their intention to transform to cashless societies. India is one such country. As a case study, we investigated rural Indian villages that declared themselves as cashless to assess the financial reality of villagers. We conducted a survey of households (N=3,159) within villages across seven Indian states. In each state, we studied a village that was officially declared cashless and a nearby comparison village. Our findings suggest that the comparison villages did as well as the cashless villages, as financial inclusion via digital banking was minimal to nonexistent. Alongside significant state variations, we found that financial literacy and online access were the best predictors of performing any digital banking activity. This study concludes with a warning against rushing toward digital banking and the formation of cashless societies, as marginalized populations may be excluded.

Innovative services such as mobile payments are potentially transformative because they can increase access to financial services, especially in developing countries. However, such innovations can disrupt the financial services ecosystem, prompting regulators to respond in different ways. These regulatory responses often have a significant impact on the success of such innovative services. Using Nigeria's regulatory approach as a case study, this article highlights specific lessons that should inform future attempts at regulating mobile payments.

In this study, we examine disparities in financial development at the regional level in India. The major research questions of the study are: how do we measure the level of financial development at the sub-national level? How unequal is financial development across the states? Does it vary by ownership of financial institutions? To explore these research questions, our study develops a composite banking development index at the sub-national level for three different bank groups – public, private and foreign for 25 Indian states covering 1996–2015. Our findings suggest that despite reforms, banking development is significantly higher in the leading high income and more developed regions compared to lagging ones. Furthermore, we find that all bank groups including public banks are concentrated more in the developed regions. Overall, over the years the position of top three and bottom three states in the aggregate banking index have remained unchanged reflecting lop-sidedness of regional development. We also note improvement in the ranking of some north-eastern states during the period 2009–15.

This article discusses the challenges affecting the achievement of financial inclusion for the poor and low-income earners in South Africa. The concept of financial inclusion could be defined as the provision of affordable financial products and services to all members of the society by the government and/or other relevant role-players such as financial services providers. This article identifies unemployment, poverty, financial illiteracy, over-indebtedness, high bank fees, mistrust of the banking system, lack of relevant national identity documentation and poor legislative framework for financial inclusion as some of the challenges affecting the full attainment of financial inclusion for the poor and low-income earners in South Africa. Given these flaws, the article highlights the need for the government, financial institutions and other relevant stakeholders to adopt legislative and other measures as an antidote to financial exclusion and poverty challenges affecting the poor and low-income earners in South Africa.

Digital financial-inclusion platforms have gained increasing attention as instruments for economic growth that also contribute to development goals such as poverty reduction and gender equality. One of the most acclaimed digital financial platforms to date is M-Pesa (M for mobile, pesa is Swahili for money) in Kenya – a mobile-phone-enabled money-transfer service realised via a public–private partnership between the UK's Department for International Development, Vodafone and its local partner, Safaricom. Since its launch in 2007, M-Pesa has grown at a phenomenal rate and it is now used by over 70 per cent of the Kenyan population. Bringing together socio-legal enquiry, feminist political economy analysis and post-colonial literature, this paper discusses M-Pesa's inclusionary regulatory arrangements and examines their implications for gender equality. It shows that, while these arrangements contribute to including women in the formal financial system, they fail to adopt the redistributive measures necessary to address the gendered socio-economic disadvantages that cause and reproduce financial exclusion.

Financial inclusion has arisen as an important social policy agenda over the past twenty years. A scholarly literature has emerged that is very critical of financial inclusion, seeing it as part of the financialisation of the everyday. Often, this theoretical literature makes little reference to how financial inclusion was developing in practice. Conversely, much of the policy literature does not refer to theoretical controversies about financial inclusion. The result is that the theoretical and policy literatures are developing in isolation from one another. This article suggests that it would be much better if there were greater mixing between these different literatures. The scholarly literature can inform the direction of policy and the applied literature can develop more nuanced versions of financialisation.

Online supply-chain financing has been a relatively novel funding channel for suppliers as small- and medium-sized enterprises (“SMEs”) to obtain loans in that the revolution of financial technology (“FinTech”) transforms traditional supply-chain financing, which used to be administered only by official banks, to an online model also used by electronic commerce platforms (“e-commerce platform”). Endeavours towards financial inclusion of the underserved SMEs could rationalize why we should allow for or encourage FinTech innovations exemplified by the online supply-chain financing mentioned above. What would be an adaptive regulatory regime for such innovative FinTech-enabled financial services as the online supply-chain financing? Within our conceptual framework to regulate the FinTech industry at the early stage, rather than rigorous rules traditionally placed on large financial institutions, a principles-based strategy should be adopted to strike a balance between financial stability and access to financial services advanced by disruptive innovations. As a necessary complement, regulatory sandboxes would be needed to spur a shift in institutional philosophy to a principles-based regulatory regime. In other words, the regulatory attitude of FinTech regulation should be humble and light-touch to promote innovation for improving digital financial inclusion, albeit on the premise of containing potential systemic risk and protecting consumer interest in the meantime.