Spotlight on Regulators: Open Banking and Financial Inclusion

Building on CGAP’s paper, Open Banking: How To Design for Financial Inclusion, this webinar featured regulators in Latin America and Africa who are implementing or planning to implement open banking regimes in emerging markets. A particular focus was on understanding how financial inclusion is affecting the regime choices they are making, as well as how challenges relating to governance and data protection are being dealt with. A representative from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision gave a global perspective about the role of open banking to promote innovation in the digital economy.

Webinar Resources

PAPER: Open Banking: How to Design for Financial Inclusion (Spanish document here and French forthcoming)

WEBINAR: Open Banking: How to Design for Financial Inclusion (October 2020)

BLOG: Open Banking: 7 Ways Data-Sharing Can Advance Financial Inclusion

BLOG: Open Data and the Future of Banking

Speakers

Opening remarks by Greta Bull (CGAP) and moderated by Stefan Staschen (CGAP) and Ariadne Plaitakis (CGAP), the webinar will feature the following panelists:

Diogo Silva | Head of Division Financial System Regulation Department, Banco Central do Brasil

Diogo Silva is head of division in the financial system regulation department at the Central Bank of Brazil. He has extensive experience dealing with financial system regulation issues, having spent the past 14 years researching market trends and innovative regulatory approaches in order to mitigate market failures and promote fair business conduct from market participants. For the past year and a half he has led the team responsible for proposing the open banking regulatory strategy in Brazil, while also being responsible at the Central Bank of Brazil’s Open Banking Committee for leading discussions pertaining new business models and operational procedures related with the implementation of Open Banking in Brazil. Diogo holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Brasilia and a post-graduate degree on Organizational Communication and Management from FIA Business School.

Comfort Phelane | Chairperson of Intergovernmental Fintech Working Group and Fintech Specialist, South African Reserve Bank

Comfort Phelane is a Fintech Specialist at the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) with nearly 10 years of experiencing working on projects to promote digital financial inclusion across Africa. Comfort leads the Innovation Accelerator in the Intergovernmental Fintech Working Group (IFWG) Innovation Hub. In the Accelerator, Comfort is particularly responsible for initiatives around open banking/ finance and MSME finance. Prior to joining the SARB, Comfort was a Manager in the Financial Services Strategy Practice at Genesis Analytics - the largest economics-based consultancy in Africa. At Genesis, Comfort was the lead financial inclusion specialist working with donors, policy makers, and financial institutions to develop strategies to reach low income segments such as MSMEs, women, youth, and smallholder farmers. Comfort also worked as a researcher at the Centre for Financial Regulation and Inclusion (Cenfri), where he worked on several multi-country initiatives to support inclusive finance through a process of evidence-based analysis feeding into roadmaps jointly implemented by a range of local stakeholders. Comfort holds a Bachelor of Commerce in Economics, a Bachelor of Commerce Honours in Economics (with distinction), and a Master of Commerce in Economics from the University of the Pretoria.
 

Douglas Kiarelly Godoy de Araujo | Member of Secretariat, Basel Committee on Banking Supervision

Douglas serves as Secretariat of the Basel Consultative Group, a forum responsible for deepening the Basel Committee’s engagement with banking supervisors around the world, regional groups and official international organisations. He is also co-Secretariat of the Financial Technology expert group, and is actively involved in the Committee’s work on monitoring the impact from COVID-19 on the global banking system. Prior, Douglas worked at the Central Bank of Brazil on macroprudential supervision (2011-15), and led the efforts to develop and implement the Brazilian segmentation and proportionality framework for prudential regulation (2015-18). He worked directly with supervisory big data from payments systems to create supervisory stress testing tools and his work on proportionality also involved prudential regulation for fintechs and other non-bank lenders. Douglas was a Fellow at the BIS's Financial Stability Institute in 2014, focusing on financial stability monitoring. From 2015 to 2018, he was also a member of missions of the International Monetary Fund to support a number of countries to enhance their macroprudential frameworks. Until 2011, he worked in the private sector in Brazilian financial markets. His current research focuses on the behaviour of fintech vs traditional lenders during the Covid-19 crisis and on banks’ practices around provisioning for loan losses in the pandemic. Past research, published by the Journal of Financial Intermediation, focused on the effects of macroprudential policy on borrowers.