超越监管沙盒，在新兴市场实现FinTech创新（英文版）.pdf

Electronic copy available at: ssrn/abstract=3059309 Report Title This is the Title style Client Name DD Month YYYY WORKING PAPER Going beyond regulatory sandboxes to enable FinTech innovation in emerging markets Simone di Castri and Ariadne Plaitakis 26 October 2017 Electronic copy available at: ssrn/abstract=3059309 bfaglobal | 02 Abstract Although technological solutions promise access to cheaper and safer financial services, creating regulation that enables innovation in the FinTech industry remains a challenge. Regulators must protect the public interest while still providing an environment conducive to product and partnership innovation. In response, many financial authorities are introducing regulatory sandboxes to simultaneously give providers the opportunity to test their innovations while also giving regulators time to learn about the risks of the products. However, as our experience with mobile money demonstrates, sandboxes do not go far enough to create a truly enabling environment for FinTech innovation. To do so public-sector stakeholders need to address broad business barriers and consider the entire package of incentives faced by FinTech firms and investors. The authors provide a nine-item list of reforms beyond sandboxes for regulators to consider in order to create a holistic and multi-dimensional ecosystem for FinTech innovation. The authors would like to thank Jake Kendall, Nick Cook, Ahmed Dermish, Jeremiah Grossman, David del Ser and Matt Grasser for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper. BFA is a global consulting firm specializing in financial services for low income people. Our approach is to seek out, create and implement financial solutions to help people manage challenges and seize opportunities. In creating solutions, we integrate our deep expertise in customer insights, business strategy, new technology, and growth-enabling policy and regulation. Founded in 2006, BFAs clients include financial institutions, tech companies, donors, investors, and policy makers. BFA has offices in Boston, Delhi, Medelln, Nairobi and New York. Innovating solution for finance, for life. bfaglobal | 03 The promise of the FinTech revolution The financial services industry has shifted from banks that happen to use technology to technology companies that offer financial services directly, as evidenced by the explosion of mobile money. Since 2001, when the Philippine telecommunication operator SMART launched its mobile money service with the Banco de Oro, hundreds of mobile money services have been rolled out worldwide. Today, there are over 180 million active mobile money accounts globally,1 and mobile money providers process over 43 million transactions daily.2 Mobile money is just one part of the FinTech revolution3, which promises to democratize the financial industry by increasing competition and choice, lowering transaction costs and prices, and deepening outreach and access. As one advocate notes: “Not only can FinTech make financial products and services more accessible, but it can also make them more affordable by lowering the cost of doing business for the financial institution, a savings which can be passed on to the consumer. Couple this with the near ubiquitous availability of affordable mobile phones and cellular networks, and a world where no one is excluded from the financial system may not be that far out of reach.”4 However, regulation remains an obstacle for the FinTech revolution, a problem familiar to many technology innovators. Googles General Manager of Access, Kevin Lo, said once that “Regulation can get in the way of innovation. Regulations tied to physical infrastructure sometimes defer the investment altogether.” Lo was referring to the challenges he faced in launching and scaling Google Fiber, a project to deliver super-fast, fiber-optic internet throughout the United States, which required overcoming all sorts of regulatory restrictions, from access to public rights-of-way to the ability to use utility poles to municipal zoning restrictions. 1 GSMA, State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money, 2016, at 17. 2 Ibid at 56. 3 The Economist, The Fintech Revolution, 9 May 2015. 4 Accion, How Financial Technology is Changing Financial Inclusion, (last visited 12 October 2017). bfaglobal | 04 While FinTech solutions promise access to cheaper and safer basic financial services, creating regulation that protects the public interest while still providing an environment conducive to innovation remains a challenge. In response, many countries are introducing regulatory sandboxes to simultaneously give providers the opportunity to test their innovations while also giving regulators time to learn about the risks of the products. However, as our experience with mobile money demonstrates, sandboxes do not go far enough to create a truly enabling environment for FinTech innovation. To do so public-sector stakeholders need to address broad business barriers and consider the entire package of incentives faced by FinTech firms and investors. Rather than jump on the regulatory sandbox bandwagon, financial authorities should take a holistic and multi-dimensional approach to supporting the FinTech ecosystem. The need for clear, enabling regulation FinTech firms, accelerators, and investors in emerging markets have many questions about the legal frameworks governing their products and services. As they confront traditional incumbents, FinTech firms and digital-first startups are often hindered by regulatory environments that are uncertain or present regulatory barriers. Many firms lack clarity over how far they can go before they become subject to onerous compliance requirements or before they violate banking, payments, telecommunications, competition, or data protection regulations. While ambiguities may offer opportunities for regulatory arbitrage, most companies and investors would rather operate under a clear regulatory and supervisory framework. Regulatory uncertainty can discourage innovation, increase time-to-market, limit access to finance, impact company valuations, and reduce product lifetime revenue. Evidence from other industries has demonstrated that delays due to regulatory uncertainty can increase time-to-market by nearly 33%, reduce lifetime product revenue by 8%, and reduce startups bfaglobal | 05 valuations by 15% due to investors and venture capitalists wariness associated with regulatory uncertainty.5 In addition to uncertainty, regulatory barriers can also be an obstacle to innovation. Over the past ten years, we have witnessed how conservative or disabling regulatory regimes have slowed the deployment and adoption of technology-based financial products in emerging markets.6 These barriers can not only slow, but also prevent, the uptake of mobile money as financial authorities struggle to keep pace with product innovation. While some regulators have allowed new providers, channels, and products to enter the market, in many countries the regulators response has been more conservative.7 Our observations about the shortcomings of regulatory regimes have been validated by other experts. In 2015, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) convened an advisory board composed of experts in policy, innovation, technology, and FinTech to discuss the impact of innovation on market fairness and how to balance promoting innovation with protecting the public interest. The advisory board found: “Regulators cannot keep up with the speed and effects of technological change. Many of todays fastest-growing companies are born out of regulatory inefficiencies. While disruptive innovators can deliver welcome new products and services, without appropriate regulatory oversight, these products and services may not serve the public interest. Broad and principles-based, rather than prescriptive, regulation is the way forward. Given how fast technology can evolve, policymakers should strive to implement forward-looking, broad regulations with clear intent.”8 Even after 16 years since the launch of the first mobile money service, fewer than 50 5 See Ariel Dora Stern, Innovation under regulatory uncertainty: Evidence from medical technology, Harvard University, January 2014,.; and Deloitte, In the face of uncertainty: A challenging future for biopharmaceutical innovation, June 2014,. Both are cited in Financial Conduct Authority, Regulatory Sandbox, November 2015. 6 See for example Simone di Castri, What could we learn from Nigeria barring MNOs from participating in the mobile money market? GSMA blog, April 2013,. 7 Simone di Castri, Is Regulation Holding Back Financial Inclusion? A Look at the Evidence, GSMA Blog, 29 January 2015. See also Simone di Castri, Mobile Money: Enabling Regulatory Solutions, GSMA, February 2013. 8 The Economist Intelligence Unit. Finding a Level Playing Field: Models and Frameworks for Policymaking in an Innovation-driven Economy. 2015. bfaglobal | 06 countries have created a suitable regulatory framework for non-bank financial service providers to offer electronic payments.9 Regulatory sandboxes Although the need for clear and enabling regulatory frameworks is well documented, balancing open frameworks with systemic wellbeing remains a challenge. Sometimes fintech firms want to introduce innovative products or services that are not suitable for outright regulatory approval because laws and regulations have been built around an old way of doing business. In a best-case scenario, the regulators goal is to maintain a level playing field, while the innovators is to disrupt the status quo. And in finance, like in virtually every industry around the world, technology is disintermediating traditional supply chains and, in turn, upending decades-old regulatory structures. Like Uber with the yellow-cab medallion taxi drivers in New York, and Tesla with the traditional car dealers in New Jersey, many fintech firms seek, through their business models, to remove the middleman (banks, insurance companies, investor advisors, etc.) and therefore face the challenge of dealing with obsolete regulatory frameworks that have been built around the businesses they aim to disrupt and are rooted in physical supply chain touch points. To address this challenge, many financial authorities are introducing regulatory sandboxes. Sandboxes allow products to be (safely) brought to market by giving providers the opportunity to test innovations and regulators time to learn. Regulatory sandboxes enable financial innovators, both start-ups and established incumbents, to test solutions in a controlled environment for a set duration without immediately incurring all the usual regulatory costs associated with lengthy approval procedures or having to tweak their products to fit in a predefined, allowed legal category. Through sandboxes, the regulator exempts the firm from several initial requirements and thus, reduces operational variables 9 Simone di Castri, 2015, cit. bfaglobal | 07 and risks for the duration of the pilot. It should be noted, however, that such exemptions are not a free pass” to conduct any type of technology experiment, as most sandboxes still impose a range of security and customer safeguards including enhanced disclosures, dispute resolution programs, and customer compensation plans.10 The United Kingdoms Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) states that regulatory sandboxes aim to: “i) reduce the time and, potentially, the cost of getting innovative ideas to market, ii) enable greater access to finance for innovators, iii) enable more products to be tested and, thus, potentially introduced to the market, and iv) allow the FCA to work with innovators to ensure that appropriate consumer protection safeguards are built in to their new products and services.”11 The sandbox approach has been implemented by United States, Australia, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Russia, Bahrain, Switzerland and Canada often with the express purpose of speeding up the product development and launch cycle in FinTech. Sandboxes are also at an early stage of development in Brunei, China, Brazil, India, Kenya, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere. To date, regulatory sandboxes have had varying degrees of success. In the UK, following a first cohort of eighteen firms in May 2016, twenty-four FinTech firms are currently in the testing phase in the second FCA sandbox, which launched on 19 January 2017. Applications have just closed for the third cohort.12 However, outside of the UK, the impact has been limited thus far. Singapore13 has only one recruit in its sandbox. In Canada14 and Australia,15 only two firms have been assisted in each jurisdiction. And in May 2017, both Malaysia16 10 Schan Duff, Modernizing Digital Financial Regulation The Evolving Role of Reglabs in the Regulatory Stack, Aspen Institute, 12 July 2017. 11 Financial Conduct Authority, 2015, cit. 12 Financial Conduct Authority, Regulatory Sandbox Blog, (last accessed 12 October 2017). 13 Monetary Authority of Singapore, Experimenting in the Sandbox Blog, (last accessed 12 October 2017). 14 Ontario Securities Commission, Our Approach Blog, (last accessed 12 October 2017). 15 Australian Securities as of March 2016, M-Pesa had over 25 million active customers.25 17 Komkrit Kietduriyakul, Kullarat Phongsathaporn G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion, Digital Financial Inclusion: Emerging Policy Approaches, 2017; Louise Malady et al., A Regulatory Diagnostic Toolkit (RDT) for Analysing the Regulatory Frameworks for Digital Financial Services (DFS) in Emerging Markets, February 2017,; Timothy Lyman, Six Tips for Policy on Disruptive Digital Financial Inclusion, 18 November 2016; G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion, Global Bodies Advance Dialogue on Supervision of Digital Finance at the Third GPFI/FSI Conference, 26 October 2016, bfaglobal | 010 with regulators.”29 Regulation: Necessary but not sufficient As promising as sandboxes are, our work on mobile money suggests that enabling regulatory frameworks are necessary but not sufficient for new business models and financial products to thrive. Even in markets where the regulator has removed regulatory barriers, telecommunications operators have often struggled to grow their mobile money business due to: lack of merchant acceptance, government resistance to digitizing payments, and poor connectivity in rural areas. For example, in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (Union Economique et Montaire Ouest Africaine, UEMOA), six countries share the same central bank and the same regulatory framework but mobile money has only gained traction in Cote dIvoire, where the government has led the demand-side push by digitizing school fees and other public sector service payme