Framing the Issues: Financial-Sector Development and Expanding Access to Credit in Myanmar

On July 26, 2017, the Myanmar Development Institute partnered with the Milken Institute Center for Financial Markets to host a strategic roundtable in Yangon. As part of the roundtable, financial-market regulators, officials from domestic commercial banks, financial-sector experts from development partners working in Myanmar, and academic and practitioner experts discussed ways to develop Myanmar’s financial markets.

The participants in the discussion agreed that Myanmar needs a specific roadmap/master plan for market development that examines the country’s financial markets from a holistic, economy-wide perspective and assesses the credit needs of private-sector businesses.

“Without a plan, we will only be working on a piecemeal basis, and we will end up creating issues which don’t exist today,” said one participant.

Key takeaways:

• A roadmap should be focused on establishing strong institutions.
• Banks and other market participants need a regulatory roadmap as part of a broader financial-sector development plan.
• The roadmap needs to address the fact that the financial ecosystem in Myanmar is currently compartmentalized and limited.
• The program would need to work through a genuine consultative process between industry and government