At the 2019 Spring Meetings the IMF’s Christine Lagarde talks with experts on the digital age. Digitalization is reshaping economic activity, shrinking the role of cash and spurring new digital forms of money and payments. The panel engaged in a lively discussion of the perils and promise of digital payments, focusing on the role of the private sector versus that of central banks.
Patrick Njoroge, Governor, Central Bank of Kenya noted that digital transactions provided a wealth of embedded information about businesses, which could have broad implications for SMEs and consumers. He offered an anecdote about Kenyan female merchants’ early morning borrowing on lending platforms as an example of the social benefits of even relatively simple digital payment technologies.
Watch the full seminar here: meetings.imf.org/en/2019/Spri...