Digitizing Government Payments: Lessons From FISF and Beyond

Governments are often the largest users of a country’s payment systems. Hence improvements in government payments and collections have a substantial impact on government efficiency, public welfare and the broader economy. Additionally, the government can also utilize its role to promote financial inclusion by influencing the choice of the payment medium.

The economic turmoil caused by the COVID 19 pandemic required governments across the world to deliver economic support quickly to millions of families uncovered by existing social safety nets. The need to distribute social-protection payments rapidly while preserving social-distancing measures forced governments and humanitarian agencies to leverage account based and non-account-based digital payments to deliver economic aid. The first part of this session will involve a discussion around the lessons emerging from countries around the use of digital technology to implement these government-to-person (G2P) social assistance programs.

The World Bank’s Financial Inclusion Support Framework (FISF) has supported several countries (Pakistan, Cote D’Ivoire, Mozambique and Indonesia) in digitizing their G2P payments and collections – which have also been discussed in detail in the World Bank’s forthcoming technical note titled ‘Tools for Digitizing Government Payments: Learnings from FISF’. The second half of the session will reflect on the experiences and learnings from two such country support programs. Specialists from the World Bank will specifically discuss the learnings and experiences from the cost of payments survey in Pakistan, and the mapping and implementation roadmap for digitization of government payments in Cote d’Ivoire.

Event Passcode for Attendees: FISF2021