Fintech Toolkit: Smart Regulatory and Market Approaches to Financial Technology Innovation

Finance has been transformed by digitization and datafication over the past five decades. The progress and global reach of technology – particularly information and communication technology – is re-shaping financial services at an unprecedented pace, with incumbents being subject to pressure to change or being disrupted by new entrants or financial institutions that can innovate faster.

Building on desk research and stakeholder interviews, this toolkit presents regulatory and other approaches to enabling safe fintech innovation. It seeks to inform the debate around emerging issues and to support financial policymakers and regulators as well as development practitioners in identifying, formulating, and implementing policy responses, with a focus on the high potential markets of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The toolkit can be used to: 

• Support the development of an entirely new regularly framework for specific innovations (e.g. in markets with little experience).
• Enhance existing frameworks to address a range of financial policy objectives in the context of digital financial transformation.