Asia and the Pacific continues to embrace advancements in digital technology that are shifting financial services from a traditional banking approach toward the decentralization and disintermediation of economic transactions. Financial technology, or fintech, as a redefined sector at the intersection of financial services and technology, has accelerated the leveraging of mobile internet access, cryptography, distributed computing, big data, and artificial intelligence that are bringing innovative applications across a large range of services, from payments to saving, borrowing, risk management, and financial advice.
Developing Asia has been growing rapidly while still saddled with relatively less inclusive financial systems. The rapid spread of financial technology offers great opportunity to reduce the cost of financial services and promote access to finance, hence profitably boosting financial inclusion and enable large productivity gains. These technological innovations have brought structural change to financial markets and increased sophistication in the delivery of financial products and services. These changes have also created new challenges for policymakers and financial regulators to understand better disruptive forces in financial products and services—as well as to identify risks—which can be destabilizing. Read more.