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[REPORT LAUNCH] People’s Money: Harnessing Digitalization to Finance a Sustainable Future

[REPORT LAUNCH] People’s Money: Harnessing Digitalization to Finance a Sustainable Future
Aug 24, 2020
[REPORT LAUNCH] As part of the GPFI implementing partners, the United Nations Task Force on Digital Financing on the Sustainable Development Goals has launched the report: “People’s Money: Harnessing Digitalization to Finance a Sustainable Future”.
 
New York City, 26 August - A new report launched today, “People’s Money: Harnessing Digitalization to Finance a Sustainable Future”, by the UN Secretary-General’s Task Force on Digital Finance sets out an ambitious, practical
Action Agenda. Centrally, it spells out how digital finance can be harnessed in ways that empower citizens as tax-payers and investors in envisaging a digital transformation at scale that better aligns people’s money with their needs, collectively expressed by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
 
The report highlights how billions of people around the world are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic using digital tools to work, spend and socialize. It argues there is an historic opportunity to harness digitalization in placing citizens, the ultimate owners of the world's financial resources, in control of finance to ensure that it meets their needs, today and in the future.
 
The Task Force identifies five catalytic opportunities for harnessing digitalization in aligning financing with the SDGs. Together they cover much of global finance:
• Aligning the vast pools flowing through global capital markets with the SDGs.
• Increasing the effectiveness and accountability of public finance that makes up a major part of the global economy.
• Channeling digitally-aggregated domestic savings into long-term development finance.
• Informing citizens how to link their consumer spending with the SDGs.
• Accelerating the lifeblood financing for the employment and income-generating world of small and medium-sized businesses.
 
Maria Ramos, Co-Chair of the UN Secretary-General’s Task Force on Digital Finance said: “We have an historic opportunity to accelerate and expand the transformative impact of digitalization. In particular, digital finance, which in this crisis became the lifeline for millions across the world, extends the boundaries of financial inclusion by empowering citizens as savers, investors, borrowers, lenders and tax-payers in a way that gives them choice and power over their
money.”
 
SME Finance Forum Member takeaway: Ant Group, through Alipay Ant Forest platform, has 550 million users who have collectively reduced carbon emissions by almost 11 million tons by March 2020.