At the ongoing annual Singapore FinTech Festival x Singapore Week of Innovation & TeCHnology (SFF x SWITCH), Microsoft founder Bill Gates has observed that the Covid-19 pandemic has been instrumental in supercharging the digital revolution.
Gates said this situation is disrupting and presents regulators with an opportunity to narrow financial inequities in their countries.
'Digital things overall, whether it's remote learning, or telemedicine, or digital finance, were greatly advanced. So even though the pandemic has been terrible, it has pushed for some of these innovations,' Bill Gates said.
He observed that, 'In this area (of) digital financial inclusion, it's gotten the governments to say, wow, we really need to fix this.'
He said the said the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is working toward enabling two-thirds of the world to gain financial access within the next 10 years.
Bill Gates cited World Bank data showing the disparity in financial access across the world â€" as at 2017, 94 per cent of adults in high-income countries had an account either with a bank, financial institution or mobile-money service provider. This proportion fell to 35% in low-income countries.
Countries like India and Kenya have in recent years put in place technologies to improve digital financial inclusion, the billionaire said.
His foundation supports India's nationwide open-source identity platform MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity Platform), which serves as the backbone for effective delivery of public and private services.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, this platform enabled authorities to channel financial help digitally to millions who were locked down in their villages.
Central banks and financial institutions are key to facilitating financial inclusion in a digital age, Gates noted.
The foundation's work involves getting central banks comfortable with these new approaches, when they see the success and that the open-source toolkit has worked to track down mistakes and make the systems reliable, he said.
And in some ways, they may find these approaches better than cash, as central banks 'can go back and audit what's going on', Gates added. 'We think over the next five years most of the central banks will see it's okay to do this, because the building blocks are very accessible and there is almost a straightforward way that they can get their citizens all connected up.'
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