The Secretary of Finance, Santiago Bausili, chaired this Thursday the tenth meeting of the Coordination Council for Financial Inclusion in the Original Peoples Hall of the Casa Rosada, where the progress made during the last 4 years was analyzed.

Before representatives of the public and private sectors, academics and international organizations, Bausili presented the status of the Council’s initiatives and exchanged opinions on the next steps to follow. “We have all agreed on the fact that the financial inclusion agenda should be a State policy and therefore should continue to develop beyond the political alignment of the government administration,” Mr. Secretary said.

Likewise, an approach was made in the areas of public policies that are considered as priorities, including the digitalization of means of payment, access to the financial system and availability of information for the purposes of credit, financial education and gender.

During the meeting, the participants also mentioned the “2019 Global Microscope ” published by “The Economist” that measures the regulatory framework for financial inclusion, in which Argentina was ranked 7^th among 55 countries, moving forward 33 positions compared with 2015.

The Financial Inclusion Coordination Council was created by resolution 121/2017 of the former Ministry of Finance to develop policies for universal access to banking and financial services. Since then, the policies promoted by the Council have tended to guarantee, to individuals and businesses, access to useful and affordable financial products and services that meet their payment, savings, credit and insurance needs, and that are provided in a responsible and sustainable manner. The creation of the Council was based on evidence that shows that high levels of financial inclusion contribute significantly to the sustained economic growth of a country and reduce the vulnerability of its citizens.

The meeting was attended by the permanent members of the Financial Inclusion Coordination Council: the Secretariat of Finance of the Ministry of Treasury; the Central Bank of the Argentine Republic; the Federal Administration of Public Revenue; the Social Security National Administration; the Ministry of Health and Social Development; the Ministry of Production and Labor; the Ministry of Education, Culture, Science and Technology; and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Public Works and Housing. Representatives of the National Securities Commission, the National Institute of Associativism and Social Economy of the Ministry of Justice, the private sector, academics and international organizations also participated.

From the Ministry of Treasury, Lacunza said that a bill will be sent to Congress to give a hierarchical status to the INDEC: “We will be sending in the next few days to Congress one of the bills that we consider a pillar of the future Argentina: “The Statistics Law”, which seeks to give a hierarchical status to the Institute, provide it with independence and guarantee the quality we all want from public statistics. It will be debated in a plural way in Congress to have a better law and for the benefit of all Argentines. ”

In this regard, the official highlighted the credibility and reliability that INDEC recovered with Mauricio Macri’s Administration. In addition, he stressed the use of new technologies to be able to load and measure statistics throughout the national territory: “An exhaustive work with cutting-edge technology and technological innovations has been done. This will enable to load almost online and be able to detect alleged real-time inconsistencies of the load of data that really do to the quality of what we present today in society, with a level of detail that at the agricultural level allows to detect acre per acre, plot by plot; what has been done in each of them; what the practices were”.

Finally, Lacunza emphasized the importance of the agricultural sector in foreign trade: “Today it represents with its chained industries more than 2/3 of the currencies of Argentina’s exports between primary products and manufactures of agricultural origin. There is a high correlation between agricultural and non-agricultural GDP that tracts other sectors. ”

Argentina ranked seventh in the list of the 55 countries most conducive to financial inclusion, published by The Economist Intelligence Unit, the independent business unit of The Economist group. In this sense, the country rose two places above last year’s ranking and 33 in relation to 2015.

The “2019 Global Microscope: The enabling environment for financial inclusion” report published on Monday analyzes the practices adopted by governments and regulators around the world to promote financial inclusion, focusing on the regulatory environment and the impact of public policies.

Thus, in the 2019 edition of the “Global Microscope”, the regulations implemented by the Central Bank in November 2018 that enabled complementary agencies, generally called banking correspondents, to facilitate citizens’ access to the banking system are highlighted. Likewise, the report qualifies as a reference milestone the publication of the draft referred to a national financial inclusion strategy in April 2019, whose final version was ratified in August this year by Resolution 17/2019 of the Ministry of Treasury.

In this regard, The Economist Intelligence Unit concluded that Argentina has achieved significant advances in financial inclusion during the last four years. According to the report, Argentina stood out above the average of the countries evaluated in the categories of “Government and political support”; “Stability and integrity”; “Products and access points”; “Consumer protection”; and “Infrastructure”.

The “2019 Global Microscope” highlights global progress in financial inclusion, and identifies Latin America as the region with the most favorable regulatory framework and policies for its development. The report also recognizes the increasing adoption of national financial inclusion strategies, the overall improvement of regulatory frameworks for digital financial services, and the evolution of data protection and cybersecurity laws in response to the challenges of the digital age.