Ivo Jeník
Senior Financial Sector Specialist

Ivo Jeník currently leads CGAP’s project on regulatory architecture at the frontier, including work on tokenization in finance, competition, and open finance supervision. He also leads CGAP’s work related to anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing measures, including collaboration with the Financial Action Task Force. Previously he led work on regulatory innovation (open finance, regulatory sandboxes, crowdfunding), capacity building for policy makers (regulation and supervision of digital financial services) and emerging business models in banking across continents.

Ivo’s core expertise is in policy. Before joining CGAP, he worked in the Responsible Financial Access team at the World Bank, where he specialized in financial consumer protection and alternative dispute resolution. His professional experience spans across both the private and public sectors, including serving as a compliance officer at an investment company and as Head of the Collective Investment Department at the Czech Financial Ombudsman.

Ivo has a Master’s degree in Law from Columbia Law School in New York and a Master’s degree in Law from Charles University in Prague.

Beyond Access: Building a Truly Inclusive Financial Future

Traditional finance is broken—it continues to leave large portions of the population unserved. Specifically, 1.3 billion adults do not have access to formal financial services. Micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) face an $8 trillion financing gap. The good news is that these large numbers are on the decline. The number of excluded adults dropped by almost half since 2011, thanks in large part to new players like mobile money providers. The bad news is that this progress is too slow.

We need a more inclusive, responsible, resilient, and equitable financial system fast because access to financial services is increasingly becoming a precondition for many other activities. In a digitized world where opportunities for livelihood, education, and human connection depend on online access, financial services are key. For instance, participation in economic life requires the capacity to receive, send, and save money electronically. To build such a system, three things are key—understanding the opportunity; understanding the challenges; and coordination between the private and public sectors.

The opportunity is clear. Beyond the excluded population, many more individuals and MSMEs remain underserved. In addition to understanding the market size, understanding customer needs is crucial. Better data analysis and data sharing, including through open finance regimes, are key to building this understanding.

The challenges are clear, too. According to the most recent Findex, the persistent barriers to financial inclusion remain unchanged—lack of money, high cost of financial services, physical distance from financial service providers, lack of trust, and lack of documentation. Without addressing these fundamental barriers, universal financial inclusion will remain unattainable. Notably, the global average financial inclusion gap between men and women is four percentage points. And this gap widens significantly in many low-income economies.

Private and public stakeholders have unique roles to play in addressing these challenges and seizing this opportunity. The public sector has many responsibilities from supporting the most vulnerable through social payments, to building digital public infrastructure such as fast payment systems and ID solutions. Financial sector regulators have a special responsibility to leverage innovation for inclusive finance—a complex task given the fast-evolving nature of innovative finance. One way to tackle this is an approach I call ‘vision-guided regulation.’ This approach requires regulators to set a long-term vision for financial market development and modernization, embrace innovation culture, set a level playing field to promote fair competition among providers, and continuously engage industry at multiple levels. The private sector’s skills in innovating can help reach new markets of underserved and excluded customers with novel thinking, new business models, and relevant products.

Importantly, both the public and private sector should expand their measurement frameworks and look beyond access and usage of financial services and to explore how financial services can improve people’s lives. There is a big opportunity to build a more responsible and inclusive financial ecosystem that increases people’s financial health and enables a more resilient, equitable world for all. Let’s seize it.