By CONSTANCE LIMUNGA
With the current weight of digitization across all walks of life, a National Financial Inclusion Forum recently held in Yaounde, to strategize on the possible ways by which local banks in the country can join the digital train for efficiency. The forum ran from June 18 to 19 2019.
Organized by the Risks Mitigation group and jointly sponsored by the Ministries of Finance and that of Posts and Telecommunications, the National Financial Inclusion Forum on the digital transformation of the banking sector and financial services focused on the theme ‘How to achieve financial inclusion and digital transformation of the banking and financial services sector in Cameroon’.
The objectives of the forum are said to bring together financial, banking and digital technology experts from public and private entities to identify the financial inclusion and digital transformation strategies of the banking and financial services sector barriers to financial inclusion, and to extend the effectiveness of digital transformation to other productive sectors of the economy. Also, it is meant to establish inclusive links between the state, international and regional banking institutions, banks, mobile operators and carriers of financial applications and contribute to Cameroon’s integration strategy under development.
Justifying the importance of the forum, the organizers held that, “the digital revolution is under way and spares no strategic sector of the economy. The financial finance of the last 15 years has profoundly changed and transformed the banking and financial services sector while creating new jobs. Africa is not outdone and has innovated, like Kenya where this transformation has allowed the inclusion and banking of 82% of the population (38.5 million) who use mobile banking and online banking, ‘a value of 75% of GDP’”, they maintain.
At the level of Cameroon, Risks Mitigation says “the numerical impact of the transformation of financial services is already bringing about perceptible and major changes from the mode and means of financial transfers, to the inclusion of a large part of the population, which was once unbanked”.
The programme is also said to focus on the potential economic benefits of the digital transformation of the banking sector and financial services for the state, enterprises and households, and the benefits of digital innovation for efficient transformation of the economy.
In the banking and financial services sector, the financial inclusion strategies that Cameroon must adopt to capture the flows of informal financial transactions, what regulations should be put in place to ensure the security, competition, expansion and reliability of financial transactions, the different roles that institutions, mobile operators and banks have to play in accelerating system convergence and financial inclusion, as well as the new digital financial technology professions were on focus in the course of the two-day forum.
It should be noted that it appears imperative for banks in Cameroon to go digital, as 60% of Cameroonians are unbanked, while about 9.5 million of them have already adopted mobile finance.