 Gary Argen on day one of GSR 17, and I'm talking now with Amoud Elgarini, a board member with the National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority from Egypt. Great to have you in the Bahamas. Pleasure is mine. Your first time here? Very first, yes. Hopefully not the last. How are you finding it so far? Outstanding. Yeah. I love the country. I love the people. It's just outstanding. It's very glad to hear that. All right, so you were talking during your presentation about mobile money. Yes. Explain to us what that is. Okay. Mobile money, mobiles have been used for the last so many years to make calls. You get a call, you make a call. Then this developed into text messaging, and then it developed into Internet, so this mobile Internet data usage. But these have been services that are being offered since the last for Nevermobile in our country in Egypt for the last maybe 15 years. There has to be an innovation, and there's always something new happening. So mobile money is really the talk of the community now in many countries of the world. We are probably not one of the first countries that started this service. You would be amazed enough to know that the very first countries that really started mobile money were in Africa. And one of the most popular countries that has this service so much enhanced is Kenya. It's probably one of the top countries that really uses mobile money. So mobile money is a feature whereby you pay your bills. You can pay your bill on using a laptop or a computer. Now you can pay your bills using the mobile. So it's not necessarily your own money in a bank account? Actually, if you're paying a bill, you're using a credit card. Paying a bill with a mobile is like paying a bill using a laptop. But to use the service with your own money, this is where you're transferring money to somebody or receiving money from somebody. And this started with the idea of people going out of a charge on their mobile. And they need to recharge. So instead of say, for example, my daughter would call me and say, Daddy, would you charge my phone with $50 or something? Now I can send her money that she will receive and do the charging herself. Or she could be stuck somewhere and she's out of cash. She can give me a call and I can transfer money to her and so on and so forth. So it's not necessarily something you could cash out? No, not necessarily. Then again, you can cash out. It will vary from one country to the other on how the application is made. In our case, obviously there are banks involved. But you, as a user, you're using your mobile outlet. You don't go to a bank, but you go to your mobile outlet, you cash the money there and so on and so forth. Now you talked about unbankers, people who don't have bank accounts. But this has been very popular with them. It's becoming popular. In Egypt and in many similar countries, people are more confident using cash. Until actually recent years, you'd find someone more confident going to the mobile shop, paying the mobile bill and getting the receipt in his hand. It's more comfortable that the deal, the transaction has been done. But this, with education, would change and they will feel comfortable that the bill has been paid or he has made the transfer and the transaction was made. So the unbankers are many who don't trust banks. They don't like using them. All over the world, I think. It's all over. They just don't trust. I do the transaction myself, I have the money in my hand. This is changing. And mobile money has become a tool that people liked and found is feasible. And it doesn't involve a lot of money. So slowly, slowly it's growing. In Egypt, is this being spearheaded by private companies or by the state? How does it work? No, no, it's private companies. Okay. We as the regulator, we set the rules. We regulate telecommunication part of the mobile money and the central bank of Egypt or central bank of various other countries would control the banking side. But it is, the operation is being done through the mobile operators, Vodafone, Orange, Salat, the actual licensed operators. But they have to be licensed operators by the regulator. And they have to be licensed banks by the central bank of Egypt. It is not for anybody to just go and decide, you know, I'm going to get into this business and it has to be a licensed operator. Do you have any numbers as to how many people are taking advantage of it now? Yes. We have approximately, it's still new. So we have approximately 97 million mobile subscribers, which we have today around 7 million using the service and counting. It's pretty good. It's been in effect, I would say, four years. Okay. Yeah. Excellent. Now, we were also talking about security. Have there been challenges and what are you doing to reduce the risk of it? There are the stakeholders in this service, the mobile network operators and the banks. Mobile network operators require, we as a regulator require them to make sure that the security and privacy of their customers is intact, that they have a reliable service, that they provide good quality service. But the banking side is the important one because you want to make sure that this service is not being used for money laundering, financing terrorism and fraud. So banks really implement the banking rules that they put on the banks to avoid money laundering and financing terrorism and so on and so forth. That is an extremely, extremely important issue. Right. Has there been much of a challenge or how are we doing so far? Well, so far we have, for money laundering, there is no much opportunity because the transfers of money is local currency, so there is no laundering of anything. We make sure that those who are using the service must open accounts at the mobile outlets. So they have to show their IDs and there is a good check, background check on them. And the banks sort of, we don't monitor their personal accounts, but we monitor, they monitor their usage to make sure that, and for the time being, we're not allowing extensive amounts of money until there is good education in the market for the service. So far there is nothing to worry about. What do you think the future holds? Where do you see this in five, ten years? No, I see it growing tremendously and I see it transferring like you're transferring money around the world. I mean, it's going to be, it's going to boom. Digital financial services in general, which includes mobile money, e-commerce, e-money, you know, there is the E of everything, digitization is an E of everything, it's going to boom. And communication technology is now involved in every aspect of our lives. Do you think this is the beginning of the end of cash, as we know it? Yes, to a certain extent. I would say, to a certain extent, to a certain extent. Exciting times. Al Gohini, thank you so much. My pleasure. And enjoy your time in the Bahamas. Thank you very much.