Experts: Trust, Not Access, Will Define Next Phase of Financial Inclusion

Nume Ekeghe

Financial sector leaders say the next phase of financial inclusion will depend less on expanding access to financial services and more on building trust across the financial ecosystem, warning that confidence has become the most critical infrastructure underpinning digital finance.

The position emerged yesterday at the virtual launch of Trust Architecture in Platform-Led Finance, a policy framework report developed by Bridgefort.

Regulators, bankers, and fintech executives, at the forum, called for stronger institutional collaboration, improved governance, and open banking to strengthen confidence in financial systems.

Speaking at the launch yesterday, Founder of Bridgefort and former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Aishah Ahmad, said, “Today’s discussion begins with a very simple observation: financial inclusion has largely solved the problem of access. What remains now is for us to determine whether confidence can keep pace with access.”

According to Ahmad, customers no longer interact with isolated financial institutions but with an interconnected ecosystem involving banks, payment platforms, fintechs, and regulators, making trust a collective responsibility rather than an institutional one.

“Customers do not experience individual institutions; they experience the financial system as a collective,” she said.

“Trust is created in the handoffs between institutions,” she added.

Ahmad stated that the Bridgefort Trust Architecture Framework identified five pillars required to sustain confidence in platform-led finance, namely, infrastructure integrity, institutional accountability, technology governance, ecosystem coordination, and cultural confidence.

She stressed that trust was fundamentally an operational issue rather than simply a technological one, saying customers judge financial systems by how they respond when failures occur.

She said, “We found that trust is fundamentally an operational question, rather than simply a technological one. People judge the system by how it performs when it fails, rather than by what it is capable of doing.”

Ahmad said identity should no longer be viewed merely as a compliance requirement but as a critical infrastructure capable of building confidence across financial transactions.

She observed that financial institutions often collaborated less effectively than the fraud networks targeting them.

Delivering the keynote address, Deputy Governor and Chief Executive of Prudential Authority at the South African Reserve Bank, Ms. Nomfundo Tshazibana, described confidence as an essential form of economic infrastructure that enabled investment, savings, and long-term economic growth.

Tshazibana stated, “Almost every commercial transaction contains an element of trust. In finance, that insight is even sharper because money, credit and promises all depend on confidence over time.”

She added, “Confidence is not just a soft infrastructure; it is an economic infrastructure.”

Tshazibana stated that financial stability should not be viewed as being against economic growth, insisting that resilient financial systems create the conditions necessary for investment and development.

She said, “It matters because financial stability is not simply a regulatory objective. It is a development objective.”

She said trusted financial institutions mobilised savings, channelled capital into productive investments, and improved economic resilience.

Tshazibana stated that regulators faced the challenge of supervising institutions in ways that protected trust while supporting innovation, particularly as artificial intelligence, climate change, and geopolitical shifts reshaped financial services.

Speaking during the panel session, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sparkle, Uzoma Dozie, said the financial industry must abandon its culture of information silos if it hoped to build trust in the digital era.

Dozie said the traditional banking model was built on secrecy, whereas the digital economy rewarded collaboration.

He stated, “Today, sharing is power. The real organised sector today is actually the cybercriminals because they share information. Banks don’t share information. Because we don’t share information and we’re not transparent, we haven’t been able to scale trust.”

He advocated the accelerated implementation of open banking, saying it would shift ownership of financial data from institutions to customers while encouraging innovation and expanding access to credit.

Dozie said, “Open banking is going to be an accelerator. It’s actually going to open up Nigeria. That’s why I say sharing is power now, not information is power anymore.”

Participants at the event agreed that as digital finance continued to evolve, strengthening trust through stronger governance, institutional accountability, consumer protection, and greater collaboration will be critical to ensuring that financial inclusion delivered sustainable economic development.