Digital Innovations for Increasing Financial Inclusion: CBDC, Cryptocurrency, Embedded finance, Artificial Intelligence, WaaS, Fintech, Bigtech, and DeFi

Digital innovations are emerging to solve known problems using new digital tools or technologies. Digital innovations also have wide application for financial inclusion. Private sector agents are using digital innovations to increase financial inclusion in remarkable ways. This chapter explores the recent digital innovations that are changing the financial inclusion landscape toward digital financial inclusion. The study used the discourse analysis methodology. It was found that digital innovations, such as central bank digital currency (CBDC), cryptocurrency, embedded finance, artificial intelligence, wallet as a service (WaaS), Fintech, Bigtech, and decentralized finance (DeFi), are helping to accelerate digital financial inclusion in many parts of the world. Each of these digital innovations serve a specific purpose, and they contribute to accelerating digital financial inclusion in unique ways, even though they all pose some risks that can be mitigated with careful and purposeful regulation.