Using the DFS Standards to Address the Crisis of Customer Harm from Digital Finance

This is an era of great opportunity and risk in the financial inclusion sector. Technology has enabled broader outreach and innovation, yet customers are also experiencing a staggering level of harm. The diverse challenges range from cyber criminality, fraud, inadequate recourse mechanisms, over-indebtedness, and lack of transparency, among others. Significant numbers of DFS customers have suffered financial loss. In response to this crisis, Cerise+SPTF spent two years developing management standards for financial service providers of all types to implement in order to offer DFS responsibly (the "DFS Standards") To identify these practices, Cerise+SPTF led an intensive and collaborative process, involving expert interviews, document review, and field testing. The DFS Standards evaluation tool is now available, as a free public good, and represents the cumulative global learning about the consumer protection risks inherent to DFS and how to mitigate them. This session will dive deeply into the DFS Standards content.