Last week CGAP hosted the first of a planned series of discussions on responsible finance in low-income financial services, with panelists Fe de la Cruz, Director of Corporate Affairs for the Central Bank of the Philippines, Denise Dias, CGAP staffer and formerly of the Central Bank of Brazil, and Daryl Collins, author of Portfolios of the Poor.

The hot topic at the table on Wednesday was the challenge of consumer rights, and maybe not for the reason you might think. It seemed, to hear our panelists tell it, that getting regulations on the book is the easier part of the responsible finance puzzle, and the real challenge is communicating these rights to consumers so they understand them and seek recourse when these rights are threatened. This is particularly challenging with the low-income users of financial services CGAP is focused on, as issues of culture, literacy, and power dynamics hinder the exercising of their rights.

The good news? To hear from the experiences of our panel and the audience at Wednesday’s discussion, innovative approaches are being tested across the globe to get the right regulations in place, and make sure they become more than just a document collecting dust in the Central Bank’s archives. In the Philippines this has meant personal finance education for children from as young as 6 years old to university-age; in South Africa the government has put the onus on the industry and financial providers to maintain lending standards amongst their peers; and Peru has even gone as far as to create an industry ombudsman, whose costs are shared by Peruvian banks on a sliding scale based on which bank receives the most complaints. This last example is important to emphasize here, as developing the right incentives for providers to behave properly runs in compliment to raising consumer awareness of their rights.

CGAP looks forward to serving as a conduit for these types of discussions, which are part of our growing work on responsible finance. We have chosen to focus our work on examining the roles that can be played by the main actors in responsible finance: Government, providers, and consumers and their advocates. They are what we like to call “the three legs of the responsible finance stool,” upon which we can build approaches that balance increased access with responsible provision of financial services to poor consumers. Be on the look-out for future responsible finance discussions, and several upcoming publications and larger events on consumer protection and responsible finance coming soon from CGAP.