News release: “The Financial Stability Institute of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) hosted the second G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (GPFI) Conference on Standard-Setting Bodies and Financial Inclusion on 30-31 October. The conference’s theme was “Standard-setting in the changing landscape of digital financial inclusion.” An estimated 2.5 billion people currently have no access to formal financial services such as payments, credit, insurance and savings. Conference participants explored the implications for regulators, supervisors, standard-setting bodies and customers themselves of the innovative, low-cost, digital transaction platforms that are facilitating financial inclusion. The pace of change is dramatic, as shown in a video prepared for the event. In Bangladesh, for example, in just two years a single digital transaction platform has reached nearly a quarter of the country’s adult population of over 160 million. Similar platforms are emerging in other countries. In more than 80 countries, mobile phones are used by hundreds of millions of poor households and tiny businesses that lack access to formal banking channels. BIS General Manager Jaime Caruana noted in his opening remarks, “The regulatory, supervisory and standard-setting challenges – and likewise the solutions – include those we currently face, and others we can only imagine as billions of new digital finance users go online.”