Dr Umar Saif, Vice Chancellor Information Technology University (ITU) along with Dr Richard Anderson, Head DFSRG & Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington (Seattle USA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) here Friday to establish a pioneering FinTech research Center in Pakistan in collaboration with the Digital Financial Services Research Group (DFSRG) University of Washington (Seattle) (http://dfs.cs.washington.edu) at ITU, Lahore with an aim of research into the financial technology space for improvement of access, creation and adoption of digital financial services and a step towards a global collaboration in DFS research.
Under the MOU, the FinTech Centre and DFSRG will conduct collaborative research in the areas of cyber security, authentication, financial education, fraud prevention, data analytics, and customer experience studies in digital financial services. The FinTech centre will also perform research on the digitization of Government-to-Person (G2P) and Person-to-Government (P2G) payments in the country. The Centre aims at working closely with the industry, government institutions, academia and customers.
Dr Richard Anderson said that it was the first ever collaboration in the World with Pakistan, which will be extended in the Africans and other Asian countries. While Dr Umar Saif stated that it would facilitate the smartphone transactions and establish transparency in the system.
DFSRG is a research group at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington and is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The goal of the research group is to develop and deploy technological solutions to specific challenges that impede the introduction and wide-scale deployment of digital financial services.-PR