Finance has always had a social function, which is often forgotten: in fact, the availability of well-organized and controlled financial services enables the growth of society, the economy, and the fight against criminal phenomena, particularly money laundering.
The reality is that in a large part of the modern world, particularly in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, access to financial services is a real privilege: and this applies both to physical services, such as bank offices or ATMs, and to digital ones.
A situation of shortage and backwardness is called under banking: whereby a large part of the world’s population has to rely on old-fashioned instruments to manage their finances, which are based on personal relationships and are difficult for the authorities to control.
One of the basic difficulties, in many places in Africa, is even that of identifying people employing documents, which practically no one possesses: this is compounded by the absolute lack of financial services, which pushes people to rely, for example, for money transfers, on a series of unofficial financial intermediaries.
As is the case, for example, with the Hawala, one of the traditional methods of money transfer, through physical intermediaries, typical of areas in Africa and Asia, which easily lends itself to becoming a tool for money laundering for criminal and terrorist purposes.
“Under banking is a difficult and problematic situation, to which we need to find effective answers, also by exploiting new technologies.” This is the opinion of Christopher Aleo, CEO of the deposit bank iSwiss, which is very active in trying to offer modern financial services to an ever-widening audience of users.
“The solutions must be able to respond to the concrete and different problems that each area manifests. ” continues Aleo. “For example, in areas where the population is scattered in villages, and it is difficult if not impossible to reach the large centers where the financial offices are located, the solution could be to provide real mobile offices”.
Just as iSwiss is doing with its ATM Truck project, which envisages the creation of real mobile ATMs, mounted on vans, capable of moving around in rural areas, enabling village populations to carry out simple financial transactions such as depositing and disbursing money.
This is a first step in the right direction: also because it should be considered that precisely those currently experiencing under-banking populations could become the quantitatively largest user of financial services in the coming decades, if the declining birth rate trend in the West continues its course.
