What is better than cash you may ask? Electronic payments of course! Easy question, easy answer, anything else you need to know?
Actually, there is a lot more to it than that and that's why the Rural Finance Thematic Group and the Better than Cash Alliance held a seminar at IFAD on 21 August.
"Empowering people through electronic payments" . Tidhar Wald, from BTC walked the participants through an interesting presentation on why the alliance is convincing Governments, the development community and the private sector to shift their payments from cash to electronic - paving the way to expand financial inclusion and help people in poverty grow assets. Digitizing payments can create lasting benefits for people, communities and economies such as: cost savings, transparency, security, financial inclusion and access to new markets. Today, more than half the adult population - 2.5 billion - are excluded from the formal financial sector.
It seems that there is no question as to the efficiency that this shift would lead to, in fact, a stimulating discussion took place on the pros and cons of this shift and how challenging it will really be to replace a cash economy - 'cash is the way people think' ...'a cash element will always remain' ...'we have a long way to go to make services available to the local people ' these were just some of the comments made.
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