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Resilience

Ensuring poor people can protect their gains and seize opportunities

Poor people are more vulnerable than most to emergencies and shocks. Building resilient livelihoods is an essential component of enabling people with low incomes to protect their gains and seize opportunities through financial services. We need to think broadly and flexibly about the kinds of solutions required, moving beyond traditional products such as insurance to consider how best to create income floors through social transfers, developing appropriate products to handle health crises, managing the effects of climate change or conflict, or protecting consumers in new ways against predatory practices of financial services providers.

Consumer Protection

CGAP has developed a new framework for financial consumer protection, one that goes beyond prescriptive regulations of “do no harm” to customers and instead requires financial services providers to pro-actively deliver positive customer outcomes. CGAP partnered with the conduct regulator and five financial services providers in South Africa to test the approach and indicators to measure progress. It was well received by regulators in Kenya and the Philippines and at a Bank for International Settlements/World Bank workshop.

Data Privacy

Low-income customers, especially the newly digital, are uniquely vulnerable to data theft, scams, and abuses. CGAP has developed a novel approach to data privacy and protection. It places the burden on providers, not individuals, to protect the data that businesses use, based on a legitimate purpose or fiduciary duty standard. Legislation introduced in India has embraced this approach, and it is gaining traction among regulators in Kenya and Australia and the mobile industry association GSMA.

CGAP also has developed the business case for building regional cyber-security centers where emerging economies can cooperate in protecting consumers and their financial systems from digital attacks.