Cryptocurrencies Can Boost Financial Inclusion Experts Agree

During the Blockchain Africa Conference in Johannesburg this month, experts concurred that cryptocurrencies could boost financial inclusion and increase economic activities in emerging markets.

Globally, two billion working-age adults are excluded from formal financial services while only 34 percent adults in Sub-Saharan Africa had an account in 2014 as indicated by World Bank data. According to industry experts, financial exclusion is caused by lack of trust, high costs, and inaccessible formal financial institutions.

“The reason a lot of these systems are broken here is [that] consumers do not trust them,” Wala CEO Tricia Martinez said.

“There is a lot of corruption [and] there is a lot of fraud. You always have a middleman monitoring and managing everything. One has to trust [that] a bank is actually going to take care of my money and not take it away. […], she added.

To increase financial inclusion, the G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (GPFI) developed high-level principles that will help governments promote financial inclusion digitally. One way to do this is through technologies such as cryptocurrencies.

The Wala platform, for example, uses a crypto-token that facilitates fast micro-payments to any place in the world at zero fees. Martinez said in order to solve the challenges of cost and access, Wala turned to the blockchain, which has enabled them to offer a zero-fee financial system to consumers.

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