Financial Service: New Project For Transforming Financial Service Provision

“Transforming Financial Service Provision through Digital Inclusion in Myanmar” Project was officially launched in Yangon on Thursday.

With funding from UKaid, the project was launched by Vision Fund Myanmar and DaNa Facility with an investment of 1.7 Million USD to extend financial services to remote areas. The project allows improved system and technical capacity to outreach to rural areas and disadvantaged groups such as women, migrant workers and smallholder farmers through innovative mobile banking services. It includes plans to educate clients and improve financial and digital literacy as well.

Director, Vision Fund Myanmar (Program and Strategy), Tim Tempany said “Over this past 9 months and the next months of the year, we are going to transform our operations - moving from an old and undated call banking system to a new flexible and modern call banking system. This will allow us to be more efficient to reach more clients to click more information on the clients to better serve them and it will also help us to provide access to more families particularly those in most native financial services in Myanmar.”

Increased range of financial services will also be offered clients beyond traditional loans, savings and insurance, to include top-up, remittance and bill payment facilities. It’s pointed out that one of the biggest challenges of transforming financial service provision through digital inclusion in Myanmar would be trust – trust of people in Myanmar to use digital financial services, to go from cash to digital services.

Director, Vision Fund Myanmar (Program and Strategy), Tim Tempany said “This digital transformation is a long journey and it will help us to be more sustainable, not just for the next 1 or 2 or 3 years, so for the next 10 or 15 or 20 years. It will help us continue to our relevance financial livelihood solutions to people in Myanmar. So, we will continue to explore new technologies, explore new business partnerships that will help us to achieve this.”

At the moment, Vision Fund Myanmar is developing a foundation for continuous development of the project until next 6 months. It is expected to launch digital financial services to the public in 2020.