But the second and potentially more powerful way in which technology is helping to drive down the cost of financial intermediation is through partnerships between financial institutions and FinTech firms. Soc-Gén is working with TagPay to provide mobile banking in Africa through a cloud-based platform that is compatible with any mobile phone. AXA is working with MicroEnsure to offer simple and affordable insurance products to customers across Asia and Africa. By helping to reduce customer acquisition costs, these collaborations have helped to serve a larger social purpose – enhancing financial inclusion and expanding opportunity. But there is a lot more we need to do. There are about 1.7 billion adults globally who are unbanked. In the ten ASEAN countries of Southeast Asia, half the adult population is unbanked. This is a shame. The ASEAN countries have a burgeoning middle class and increasingly modern infrastructure, yet so many do not have access to a bank account, secure and affordable payments, or insurance protection. Banks and insurers face high costs in reaching out to customers in remote areas. We need to take collaboration between financial institutions and FinTech firms to a much broader level – through platforms for innovation and inclusion. This is why the MAS, the ASEAN Bankers Association, and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation have teamed up to establish the ASEAN Financial Innovation Network, or AFIN in short. AFIN aims to bring banks and FinTech firms from across the world to develop innovative solutions to penetrate hard-to-reach markets in a cost efficient way.
The Securities Holdings Statistics can also contribute to providing a better picture of interconnectedness at the financial system level and for sectors of the euro area economy. In the same vein, the new Centralised Securities Database of the European System of Central Banks that holds complete and consistent reference information on individual securities is a major step in the direction of a better understanding of the map of cross-exposures through securities holdings. Further work on enhancing statistical sources and output has been carried out in recent years. A high priority has been given to the development, collection and maintenance of conceptually sound and consistent granular data, and – by exploiting sources of micro data – to monitoring credit exposures, especially those of large financial groups. In addition, efforts have been made to obtain a consistent picture on securitisation and credit risk transfers in general. At the same time, work is being undertaken in cooperation with the European Statistical System (Eurostat and National Statistical Institutes) to improve the availability of macroeconomic data, as well as financial and non-financial accounts statistics. In the context of the ESRB-related work, data-sharing agreements have been put in place to allow the regular provision by the ESAs of aggregated information to the ECB in support of the ESRB’s risk analysis.