Financial consumer protection standards and frameworks for digital financial services: Landscape report

Abstract

The term ‘financial consumer protection’ refers to the framework of laws, regulations, and institutional arrangements that safeguard consumers by ensuring fair and responsible treatment for them in the financial marketplace. It plays a critical role in building and maintaining trust in the formal financial system and preserving financial stability by ensuring that financial providers operate responsibly and are accountable for their market conduct with regard to consumers’ harm. It also helps financial inclusion result in equitable growth by enabling consumers to access and use suitable products that contribute to their well-being and resilience.
Financial consumer protection is a long-standing public policy objective, and financial authorities have become progressively concerned about it in response to the global financial crisis, which represented a wake-up call highlighting the relevance of protecting consumers and ensuring fair and responsible treatment for them in the financial marketplace.
Since then, international organisations have developed guiding principles and policy recommendations to promote comprehensive and effective frameworks for financial consumer protection, and financial authorities have increasingly adopted and prioritised financial consumer protection as a critical supervisory area.
To conceptualise Consumer Protection frameworks better, we’ve developed this report, which analyses the relevance of the prominent frameworks and practical approaches to financial consumer protection to inform the development of the GSMA agenda on this subject and contribute to a safer digital financial services ecosystem with a higher degree of consumer protection.

Keywords: consumer protection, mobile money, fintech, responsible finance, financial stability, emoney, e-money, financial inclusion,