Research & Analysis
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I-SIP Toolkit: Policy Making for an Inclusive Financial System

As of 2018, more than 90 countries have publicly committed to promoting financial inclusion—and the number will continue to grow. Financial regulators and supervisors in these countries are discovering the value of a structured approach in helping them to implement policies and strategies on financial inclusion (I) alongside their core responsibilities to promote micro- and macroprudential stability (S) and financial integrity (I) and to protect financial consumers (P)—objectives collectively referred to as I-SIP.

This Toolkit uses lessons learned from CGAP’s extensive analysis of real-life country experiences. It helps financial regulators and supervisors to implement a structured approach for managing the complex interplay among the I-SIP objectives – the I-SIP Approach. The approach outlined in the toolkit has been used successfully in different policy-making environments and can be adapted to fit your needs.

Financial regulators and supervisors make important policy decisions and often face serious questions and problems:

  • Your institution wants to address financial inclusion, but you have other objectives that concern you: stability, integrity, and protection.
  • Your institution often makes decisions based on intuition, but you are concerned about unintended consequences.
  • It is difficult to establish a structured process in your organization that will enable you to properly evaluate or discuss a key policy issue.
  • You are facing an increasingly fast-changing and complex financial landscape and have little time to assess a proposed policy intervention.

This Toolkit is designed to be accessible and to take you through a defined process to make policy decisions and to effectively implement them. It features a brief overview of the I-SIP Approach, four things to keep in mind as you begin, and the structured process rendered in seven steps. It is complete with annexes that give you more in-depth information and links to other resources and a workbook you can use to document your ideas and progress.

Related Resources

Publication

Under the right circumstances, financial inclusion, stability, integrity, and consumer protection (collectively referred to as I-SIP) can be positively related, and the failure to consider any one of these objectives can lead to problems.
Publication

This report introduces and develops the concept that a proportionate approach to any financial inclusion measure (and specifically to its regulatory and supervisory design and implementation) should seek to optimize the I-SIP linkages.