This commitment reflects our willingness and determination to continue our financial inclusion efforts, which have enabled Morocco to become a regional benchmark, given the significant progress it has achieved in this regard. Such efforts have been reported by the World Bank and the IMF during their last Financial Sector Assessment Mission (FSAP) conducted in 2015. Ladies and gentlemen, Aware of the importance of data for designing relevant policies, Bank AlMaghrib has taken specific measures to develop, in line with international standards, a set of indicators which address two fundamental dimensions of financial inclusion: access to and use of financial services. As for the “quality” dimension, it is monitored for the time being through the Banking Services Price Index, which we developed in 2011 and which accurately reflects the cost and trend of banking services. Moreover, considering the weight of very small, small and medium enterprises (VSMEs) in our industrial fabric and their role in employment and wealth creation, we mobilized various public and private actors to establish an observatory for VSMEs. Founded in 2016, this observatory aims at (1) centralizing national and regional data and information on VSMEs, and (2) generating demographic, economic and financial information on economic sectors in order to allow stakeholders to respond more effectively to the issue of financing this specific category of companies. We have also established two credit bureaus, the first in 2007 and the second in 2016, in order to provide credit institutions and similar bodies with a common platform for the exchange of data.

The objective of this platform is to help these institutions better assess the risks incurred on their counterparties, through solvency reports specifying the commitments of their customers and their payment behaviors. It also allows Bank Al-Maghrib to measure the use of loans by the population and to evaluate the impact of actions taken on the supply and demand side. 5  And in 2013 we launched, jointly with the World Bank, a survey on Moroccan households’ perception of financial services. This survey helped us identify the barriers hindering the development of financial inclusion and allowed us to better prepare our first national financial education strategy. A second survey called “Global FINDEX” will be conducted shortly and will serve as a basic diagnosis to define our national financial inclusion strategy. Ladies and gentlemen, The data collected over the past few years show the real progress made and the challenges ahead: disparities between regions, rural and urban areas, gender, data quality improvement and the development of an effective tool to measure impact. These challenges emphasize the need to continue our joint efforts, both nationally and internationally, and to get mobilized, in an overall and harmonized manner, to develop financial inclusion of the population across all segments. Data reliability is not an issue specific to Bank Al-Maghrib. This was evidenced by the last report of the Irving Fisher Committee on “Measures of Financial Inclusion - Central Bank Perspectives”, prepared on the basis of a survey carried out during the 4th quarter of 2015 in 47 countries.