Fintech is increasingly recognized as a key enabler for financial inclusion. With its benefits, however, fintech also poses new risks to consumers and heightens existing ones. As COVID-19 accelerates a widespread transition of consumers from cash to digital financial services, authorities face challenges when keeping pace and mitigating emerging risks – particularly in countries implementing baseline consumer protection frameworks at the same time. This session explores consumer risks posed by fintech innovations (particularly digital credit, peer-to-peer lending, and crowdfunding), including those exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis, and emerging country policy approaches employed to mitigate those risks to consumers while maintaining a robust consumer protection regime.
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Access to effective financial consumer complaint handling mechanisms is as an essential element of an effective financial consumer protection framework. Accessibility of financial consumer alternative dispute resolution (ADR) has several practical aspects, including that ADR should be well-known and easy to access and use for consumers. Technology can assist in overcoming obstacles to accessibility, such as physical distance and remoteness and, as shown during the COVID-19 pandemic, and enhance ADR’s effectiveness, including improving user-friendliness of complaint capture and processing. This session will explore practical experiences from several ADR schemes and emerging approaches for leveraging technology to enhance accessibility and effectiveness of ADR.
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This session will explore concrete examples of technology solutions being leveraged by market conduct supervisors around the world to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of market conduct supervision. Recent advancements in SupTech solutions, particularly around automated data collection and analysis of unstructured text, can provide significant benefits to market conduct supervisors seeking to better monitor consumer risks in an increasingly complex digital environment.
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