On 27-28 April 2017, a Digital Financial Services (DFS) Workshop will be convened in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago to update policy makers in the Caribbean about the latest trends in financial technology.

The  Digital Financial Services (DFS) Workshop is organized by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) subregional headquarters for the Caribbean in partnership with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the Telecommunications Authority of Trinidad and Tobago (TATT), the UWI St. Augustine Campus, and the Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU). 

In light of the success of the Financial Technology workshop held in Port of Spain from 1 - 3 June 2016, the DFS workshop should benefit policy makers seeking greater participation in the digital economy. 

Financial technology, or FinTech, encompasses a range of approaches to the modernization of the financial services industry. These include new forms of payment systems to support e-commerce, crowd funding technologies to enable business development, and regulatory tools that can detect and prevent financial crimes. 

FinTech is an emerging sector poised for high growth in coming years. It appears to be a field in which Caribbean companies may be able to specialize and prosper, and to build services that can be exported to global markets.

ECLAC has been in the forefront of identifying appropriate policy responses that address this wave of new financial technologies that have emerged in recent years, and supports the idea that there is great value in bringing together stakeholders from both regulatory institutions and the Caribbean’s financial technology industry. 

The workshop  is expected to bring together stakeholders ranging from financial and telecommunications/ICT regulators; to representatives of academia and institutions critical to research and development of the innovation sector; entrepreneurs seeking to develop and use innovative financial solutions; mobile network operators; banks; financial service providers; mobile financial services platform providers, as well as international organizations, NGOs involved in financial inclusion programmes and civil society.