International Development Organizations (IDOs) are uniquely placed to deliver responsibly digitized payments.
Through their many roles and capacities, IDOs can ensure that the migration to digital is balanced, responsive to user need, consumer centric, gender intentional and protects those most vulnerable. IDOs are a vital component of the digital payments ecosystem and their inclusion agenda will create financial opportunity for those they serve.
The Principles highlight six key areas where international development organizations can change lives for the better.
Back to the PrinciplesIn their role as convenors, IDOs can bridge competitive, national and policy boundaries and draw actors together in a spirit of collaboration. In their role as overseers of grants, IDOs are ideally placed to share guidance relevant to the responsible and transparent implementation of digital payments everywhere.
Through grants, IDOs interact with the finest product design minds. Through research, IDOs have peerless knowledge of the unique wants and needs of the underserved. Through both, IDOs have unparalleled insights into solutions for user-centered design.
IDOs share insights freely such that governments and the private sector can optimize them. User-centered design is integral to empowering women and unlocking trust among the underserved. IDOs have the knowledge and opportunity to change this.
IDOs can gauge and report on the impact of new technologies on beneficiaries as they penetrate the sector. The biases latent within AI, Big Data, and algorithms have been studied and sifted by IDOs. Consequently, they are able to share methods by which to avoid discriminatory bias to the underserved in the realms of data, coding, marketing and outreach.
IDOs can provide technical assistance to digital payment partners and civil society on recourse as an integral component of their support offering. IDOs possess insights from scrutinizing successful redress systems (and those that experienced challenges) that can be pooled and shared with the ecosystem.
Their access and international footprint mean that IDOs are able to quantify the impact of successful digital payments on end users, communities and economies. Subsequent lessons make the case for digital financial inclusion globally and reveal the importance of ensuring interoperability is at the heart of digital payments.