海外之声 | 创新如何提升金融包容性(中英双语)
观点速递
本文作者是卡托研究所货币与金融替代中心分析师迭戈·苏卢阿加。原文首次刊登于CapX。
作者指出,金融服务给我们的生活方式和生活水平带来了显著的影响,尤其是在新兴市场。同时金融科技也对妇女解放产生了显著影响。其主要驱动方式是创新银行和支付的推广,但在一些西方富裕国家却遭到了监管壁垒。
中文译文如下:
创新如何提升金融包容性
迭戈·苏卢阿加
翻译:黄朝政
审校:熊若洁
2018年6月27日
当世界上最大的两个经济体忙于破坏性地寻求限制人与人之间的贸易时,关于全球化积极影响的任何证据都不可能很快出现。
最近,世界银行发布的关于全球金融包容性的Findex报告为我们提供了例证。该报告在140个国家详细调查了家庭与银行业务往来、储蓄以及借贷模式,涵盖了发达国家和发展中国家、富裕和贫困群体、女性和男性,追踪了扩展金融服务获取途径的进展。
随时可用的可靠银行和支付设备对于人类的繁荣而言至关重要。与人们可能认为的不同,这些服务对富裕群体和受过高等教育的群体并不是最重要的。前沿市场上的小规模农户、农民工和萌芽期的创业者极为依赖廉价且透明的支付和信贷体系,因为他们几乎没有其他就业选择,而且通常面临自有资金不足的问题。
如果没有基本的金融服务,这些人的生活方式就会受到影响,他们的生活水平也会下降。
第一份(2011年)和第三份(2017年)Findex报告的发布相隔了六年,其间,使用移动支付或拥有银行账户的世界人口所占比例显着增加,发展非常顺利。如今,全世界有69%的成年人在使用这些服务中的一种或两种,而在本十年初,这一比例为51%。
新兴市场成为了金融服务近来推广成果最显著的地区。虽然在这些国家,拥有账户的成年人比例(63%)远远低于高收入国家,但在六年前,这一比例仅为40%。即使相较于全球发展的其他衡量标准,这一增长率也是非常不错的,例如,我们近几十年来取得重大进展的减少极端贫困和对抗传染性疾病方面的工作。
有一个趋势比任何其他趋势都更有助于解释金融包容性最新的进展,即移动银行和支付的发展。
M-Pesa在肯尼亚的革命性影响已经比较有名。自2007年推出以来,这一移动支付系统减少了一半以上的资金转账成本,处理时间从几小时缩短到了几分钟或几秒钟。M-Pesa迫使西联汇款等现有资金转移服务提供者大幅降低了他们的收费,还使得数百万肯尼亚人接触到了正规金融部门,促进了银行和储蓄账户获取途径的发展。
撒哈拉以南非洲的其他经济体迅速追随肯尼亚脚步,其发展程度往往没有被充分认识到,但Findex报告证实了这一点。自2011年以来,在包括加纳、尼日利亚、塞内加尔和坦桑尼亚在内的六个国家,40%以上的成年人拥有移动支付或银行账户。
在那些男权倾向严重的社会中,金融科技对妇女解放产生了显著影响。
除了赋权和独立自主的考虑外,希望女性拥有获取金融服务的途径,还有明显的实际原因。她们不仅占成年人口的一半,还是家庭决策和养育子女的主要负责人,因此,在金融方面活跃且受过教育的女性对周围人的幸福具有积极影响。
拥有银行账户的女性,可以独立于她们的丈夫和父亲进行储蓄和创业。在传统上反对创办企业的社区中,为包括女性在内的拥有创业雄心的少数人提供金融服务,可以推动发展。
创新银行和支付的推广为庆祝提供了理由。然而,正当发展中世界飞速提升金融包容性时,西方国家正在提升自己的人民借贷、储蓄和投资的难度。
美国也许是最显著的例证。截至2015年,7%(900万户)的美国家庭没有银行账户。另有19.9%的家庭“缺乏银行服务”,因为他们不得不求助于替代(通常成本更高)的信贷和其他银行服务提供者。
专家们对美国无银行账户问题背后的驱动因素看法不一。堪萨斯城联邦储备银行上周发文称,收入、教育、就业和种族都可以预测一个人使用基本银行服务的可能性。事实上,正如丽萨·塞尔翁(Lisa Servon)在她的启发性著作《去银行化的美国》(The Unbanking of America)中写到的,贫困群体和少数族裔往往更喜欢使用其它金融服务,因为他们发现,它们比银行更透明,更容易获得,甚至更尊重他们。但这种便利是有代价的,而且有时风险很大。
堪萨斯联邦储备银行研究人员还发现,互联网连接与获取银行服务之间存在很强的相关性。这种关系可能反映了贫困群体、无银行账户群体和无互联网群体中部分人口的全面边缘化,但同时也表明,在确保获得金融服务方面,科技发挥着越来越重要的作用,即使在成熟市场中也是如此。
不过,提升创新主导的金融包容性遭遇太过频繁的监管。美国主要银行监管机构联邦存款保险公司自2008年以来一直拖延发放新的银行执照。同样,有希望的全国执照可以降低新的金融科技平台的门槛,但其实现过程却很缓慢。M-Pesa模式中的支付创新受到了50个州不同转账规定的阻碍。
越来越严格的反洗钱法律有可能将普通公民变成重罪犯,旨在保护消费者的规则使得银行在为其中一些人服务时无法盈利,这也阻碍了贫困群体获得银行服务。在英国,金融行为监管局提出的透支费用上限已被搁置,但目前再次处于考虑之中,一旦付诸实施,几乎肯定会产生这种的影响。事实上,针对发薪日贷款的类似措施已将数十万借款人排除在了这个市场之外。
富裕国家应该应当向新兴市场学习,让创新驱动金融包容性的发展。除非各国消除账户所有权的监管壁垒,最贫困的群体将面临更加落后的风险。这将导致可怕的政治和社会后果。
英文原文如下:
How Innovation Drives Financial Inclusion
Diego Zuluaga
27 Jun 2018
At a time when the world’s two largest economies are engaged in a destructive quest to limit trade between people, any evidence of the benefits impact of globalisation cannot come soon enough.
Recently, we got just such an illustration in the form of the World Bank’s Findex report on global financial inclusion. The report is a detailed survey of the banking, saving and borrowing patterns of households in 140 countries. It covers developed and developing nations, rich and poor, women and men, tracing progress in the expansion of access to financial services.
Ready availability of reliable banking and payments facilities is essential for human flourishing. Contrary to what one might think, it is not for the rich and highly educated that these services are most important. Small-scale farmers, migrant workers and budding entrepreneurs in frontier markets depend critically on cheap and transparent payments and credit systems, as they have few alternative employment options and usually have meagre funds of their own.
Without basic financial services, the way of life of these people would be compromised and their living standards would decline.
It is therefore an auspicious development that the six years between the first (2011) and third (2017) editions of the Findex report have seen significant increases in the percentage of the world’s population with mobile money or bank accounts. Sixty-nine per cent of adults worldwide now use one or both of those services, compared to 51 per cent at the start of the decade.
Nowhere has the recent spread of financial services occurred most visibly than in emerging markets. While the share of adults owning accounts in these countries, at 63 per cent, remains far below their high-income counterparts, it stood at just 40 per cent six years ago. This rate of growth is remarkable even when compared to other measures of global development, such as the reduction of extreme poverty and the fight against communicable diseases, on which we have made great strides in recent decades.
One trend more than any other helps to explain the recent progress of financial inclusion, namely the expansion of mobile banking and payments.
The revolutionary effects of M-Pesa in Kenya are already relatively well-known. Since its introduction in 2007, this mobile money payments system has more than halved the cost of fund transfers and cut processing times from hours to a few minutes or seconds. M-Pesa has forced incumbent money transmitting services such as Western Union to slash their fees. It has also introduced millions of Kenyans to the formal finance sector, facilitating access to bank and savings accounts.
The extent to which other economies in sub-Saharan Africa have rushed to follow in Kenya’s footsteps is often not fully recognised, yet the Findex report bears it out. Since 2011, half a dozen countries, including Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Tanzania, have more than 40 per cent of adults with a mobile money or bank account.
Financial technology is also having a marked impact on the emancipation of women in societies that have tended to be highly patriarchal.
Aside from considerations of empowerment and autonomy, there are obvious practical reasons to want women to have access to finance. As well as making up half the adult population, they are chiefly in charge of household decisions and the raising of children, so financially active and literate women have a positive impact on the wellbeing of those around them.
And women who own a bank account can save and build businesses independently from their husbands and fathers. In communities that are traditionally averse to enterprise, giving access to financial services to the few - including women - with entrepreneurial ambition can accelerate development.
The spread of innovative banking and payments provision gives cause for celebration. Yet, just as the developing world gallops towards financial inclusion, Western countries are making it harder for their own people to borrow, save and invest.
America provides perhaps the starkest illustration. As of 2015, 7 per cent of U.S. households, nine million of them, did not have a bank account. An additional 19.9 per cent were “underbanked” in that they had to resort to alternative (usually higher-cost) providers for credit and other banking services.
Experts disagree on the drivers behind the scale of America’s unbanked problem. A paper published last week by the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank finds that income, education, employment and race all predict one’s likelihood of using basic banking services. Indeed, as Lisa Servon shows in her illuminating book The Unbanking of America, the poor and minorities often prefer to use alternative financial services because they find them more transparent, more accessible and even more respectful than banks are to them. But this convenience has a price, and it’s sometimes steep.
The Kansas Fed researchers also find a strong correlation between internet connectivity and access to banking. While this relationship may reflect the general marginalisation of a fraction of the population who are poor, unbanked and unconnected, it points to the increasing importance of technology for securing access to financial services, even in mature markets.
But too often regulation stands in the way of innovation-led financial inclusion. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a key U.S. bank regulator, has dragged its feet since 2008 on issuing new bank licenses. Similarly, a promised nationwide charter that could lower barriers for new fintech platforms has been slow to materialise. Innovation in payments in the M-Pesa mould is hampered by disparate money transfer rules across the 50 states.
Poor people’s access to banking is also hampered by a growing mire of anti-money laundering laws that threaten to turn ordinary citizens into felons, and by rules aimed at protecting consumers that make serving some of them uneconomical for banks. In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority’s proposed cap on overdraft charges, which had been shelved but is now again under consideration, would almost certainly have this effect. Indeed, similar measures against payday loans have shut out hundreds of thousands of borrowers from that market.
Rich countries should take their lead from emerging markets and let innovation drive financial inclusion. Unless countries remove regulatory barriers to account ownership, they risk the poorest falling ever further behind. The political and social consequences of that would be dire.
内容整理 罗梦宇
图文编辑 罗梦宇
审校 田雯
监制 朱霜霜
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