 Welcome to ITU. At the ITU studio here this morning we have Bilal Jamusi, who is the chief of the ITUT study groups department for ITU. Bilal, welcome to the studio. Thank you very much for having me. I wanted to ask you a little bit about Fiji, what are some of the key aims of Fiji and particularly this event, which is the Fiji security clinic. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about this. Fiji, of course, is the financial inclusion global initiative, which is a partnership between the ITU, the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And as you mentioned, after the symposium that was at the beginning of the year, now we're looking at sharing some of the output of one of the working groups of Fiji, which is the security infrastructure and trust working group. That has been working really hard on developing reports that will aid in the implementation of these guidance and principles in a number of areas, as you expect in the security and trust of the system. In particular, we're looking at the SS7 vulnerabilities. The SS7 is the protocol used to pretty much do all the signaling for the telephone network today, mobile and fixed. And it's a protocol that was developed by the ITU many years ago. And it was developed in a context of trust where the telecom operators are interconnected physically. When Voice Over IP came, Voice Over the Internet protocol, and also Voice Over mobile networks arrived, that basic assumption that all of the operators are interconnected in a physical fixed line with a trust that is assumed, some of those assumptions are no longer there. And so some vulnerabilities were introduced in the protocol, the SS7 protocol. Now, when the telephone network is being used for transacting money, it's critical that those vulnerabilities are addressed and you don't essentially lose your money by doing transactions. So the security infrastructure and trust working group has been working on that area of mitigating these vulnerabilities. The report is ready, so they will be sharing it the first day of the clinic. And then we also have been working on strong authentication because in order to transact money, we need to know the bank or the digital service provider, financial service provider needs to know who you are with a very large degree of certainty. So the authentication is another area that we will have a report on a strong authentication. A new technology called blockchain or distributed ledger technology is quite applicable in the domain of financial services, so there is a report on the security of DLT. And generally when you introduce new areas of work in digital financial services, the regulators want to have a level of assurance. So there is an assurance framework document that would allow both the telecom or the banking regulator to ensure that the services being offered in digital form, financial services in digital form have a framework of assurance that governs that. So those are the four main reports that will be discussed in the first day of the symposium. And the idea of the clinic, the security and infrastructure and trust clinic is ready to share this finding that was developed by experts in the field including both IT, ICT experts and banking experts. And hopefully those reports will then be used by the implementation countries. We have three main implementation countries in Fiji, Egypt, Mexico and China. Now there is an urgent need for telecom and financial services regulators to collaborate to address security in digital financial services very much as you have hinted here. Do you agree with this statement? Absolutely. The biggest hurdle in accelerating the adoption of digital financial services is the fact that these services come at the intersection point of two regulatory authorities. The telecom regulator and the central banks or the financial regulator. The countries that have been able to have a collaborative approach for the regulation between the telecom and the banking have been able to offer services quickly to their citizens. And we use this forum in the security infrastructure and trust and the whole Fiji partnership to provide a ground for dialogue and sharing between the telecom and the financial service provider to allow the enabling environment so that these services can be deployed at a scale. Now you've got about 100 people turning up for this security clinic. I wanted to ask you, perhaps looking back a little bit on this, how has the whole financial inclusion global initiative been going? What has been the progress like for it so far? We are closing the gap, you know, that the premise of this work is that a few years ago we had about 2.5 billion adults who were not banked and about 1.7 billion out of those that had a mobile phone. And we started working with our partners to close that gap and try to use those mobile phones to provide financial inclusion. Today the numbers are down in terms of the unbanked population. It's about 1.7 billion or so unbanked and 1.2 billion out of those unbanked have a mobile phone. So this activity on providing the enabling environment, providing the technical solutions, working in the countries to implement these new techniques and ideas is certainly bearing fruit and we are closing the gap in financial inclusion. And this security clinic is one of a number of clinics that are taking part of the initiative and reporting upon it and dealing with that in isolation, is that right? Indeed, we have the big milestone per year which is the symposium, but in between the symposia we have these clinics. We also have workshops in the countries, the implementation countries. In September we had a workshop for example in Mexico where we, you know, all the partners have discussed the progress of the country implementation in Mexico. We also continue to have in-country workshops in Egypt and in China and those are big countries in terms of population where we can have a big return on investment in terms of closing the gap on financial inclusion. Now security and data privacy are going to play a key role obviously in winning consumer confidence and catalyzing the adoption of fintech for financial inclusion. I wanted to ask you a little bit about your perception of this and why that statement would be true. For any consumer who used to transact in cash, there was a certain privacy in the transaction and also a certain security that they had the cash in their hands and they can hand it to the merchant or to someone that they needed to pay. When you move into the digital era and digital domain, we need to provide the same level of trust and maybe a higher trust of the privacy of the transaction so your data of the transaction needs to be protected. The banking sector is taking good care to make sure that that data is protected and that your transactions are private to you. And those are some of the elements of the data privacy that need to be in place. At the same time when we move from the physical world to the digital world and we see more and more financial providers providing APIs or protocol interface to have applications on top, those APIs open a new attack surface and we need to ensure that those protocols are secure and as we move to the digital platform we continue to have strong security and strong privacy for the data of the user. And that brings trust to the user to move from traditional cash transactions to the digital financial service. What do you hope will be the final outcomes from this security clinic here? I mean apart from obviously presenting the reports so far and the work done so far, what do you hope will come from this feeding into perhaps the next year symposium? Well, one is to share the information of the reports because it was being worked by a small group of experts in the working group. Now we would like to make that knowledge available broadly to the implementation countries primarily but really broadly to any country that is in the process of transforming from physical money to digital money. The second is through the clinics we want these experts to share experience and we have a diverse set of participants. We have some folks coming from the banking sector, some coming from the telecom operator sector, some vendors, some consumer protection groups. So we want to make sure that the ecosystem has the latest technologies, has the latest information in order to accelerate this financial inclusion globally. And you talked about the aims of Fiji, you talked about digital financial inclusion and obviously the figures are going up. People are accepting it more and more and adopting it more and more. But what do you think is going to be the catalyst? What do you think is going to be the most important feature of digital financial inclusion that's going to encourage people to get involved and to essentially become digital as opposed to physical? One word, trust. If the consumer or the user trusts that this new device and new solution will provide them the service that they want with the security and the privacy aspects and that they're not going to lose their money, then people will use it more and more. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.