Dr. Joy Malala-Scholz

Dr Malala- Scholz has an interest in financial regulation with a special emphasis on Regulation Post Financial Inclusion in developing countries as well as from regional perspectives. She researches the structure of regulation and supervision, risk-based system of supervision, legal accountability of regulators, corporate governance, enforcement sanctions, deposit insurance and the use of external auditors. She has a long longstanding interest in studying the area of financial sector reform examining the role of Central Banks. She also researches from a comparative perspective, on the examination of ‘hybridized’ systemically important financial institutions and their impact on market economies.

Dr Malala- Scholz obtained her PhD from the University of Warwick in 2014, where she researched on the emerging legal and regulatory issues that mobile payments introduced in 2007. She argued that the law on payments systems was incomplete as it does not address the specific issues necessary for an effective payment system. Her work also argued that the current regulatory regime is weak and largely unfelt due to the nascent state of development of technology in the payments system. She also addressed the regulatory approach taken by Kenya in regulating mobile payments juxtaposing the realities that combine to blunt the impact of innovation and access to finance. I offered all these as a foundational discussion on the regulatory capacity for the adoption and development of mobile payments within a regulatory vacuum and proposed an appropriate regulatory framework.