 Welcome to the Fiji Symposium in Cairo, Egypt, where I'm very pleased to be joining the studio today with Mr Mark Hollander, who is special advisor on financial infrastructure for the Bank for International Settlements. Mark, welcome to the studio. Thank you. Now, I'd like to start off by talking a little bit about the digital financial services over cash situation. I was just wondering, really asking you, what will it take for the world's poorest people to prefer digital financial services over cash, and will digital financial services be enough for this to happen? It's a very interesting question because it raises many issues. I think it's important to try to get people to change from cash to digital services. I'll say a few words on that later on. But it's one of the centerpieces of the work we've been doing at the community markets and payments infrastructure at the BIS. The payments aspects of financial inclusion report is really based on having a transaction account for people to be able to meet their needs for making payments and save money. A transaction account is widely defined as being either an account at a bank, but also an account at any regulated authorized service provider, and that could be a mobile terminal communications provider, that could be any non-bank institution, and that's what we would call e-money accounts. So we think it's important to use that. On the other hand, I think I would also want to caution against completely abandoning cash. There are a few countries in Europe where cash is really used less and less. It is becoming a problem, central bank getting worried, not only because it makes life difficult in running their monetary policy and in doing their business, but also at some point, even though you want people to be included, you don't want to force them to such an extent that some people might unwillingly become excluded. In fact, if you're in some of the cities in that country and you want to make a payment, if you don't have a payment card with you, the flock, nobody takes cash anymore, and I'm not sure that's where we want to end up. We would like to incentivize people to move to a transaction account, but I don't think there's anything wrong with using cash. So I think we need to keep a balance here. What you need to do to do so, there are many ways. The report lays out a whole number of things. You could do that through incentivizing providers of money services. The regulatory framework is important. Access points, you need to have access points all over so people can get to their money. You need a good telecommunications infrastructure, wide safety in those things. I mean there's a lot of things, but we have been working on that. In terms of governments, what role can governments play to enhance the usage of digital financial services at the national level? I think governments, and when I say I, the report we published in April 2016, we set out quite an important role for governments and other businesses. We have one of our drivers for financial inclusion, which we call large value recurrent payment streams. This is really talking about payments which happen on a regular basis, low value mostly, but large volume. The government here has a specific role because obviously governments channel a lot of payments. In the sight of government paying out money, I'm thinking mostly about salaries for government staff in most countries. That's a considerable number of people. I think also of welfare payments, health benefits, food stamps, children allowances, all these other payments governments make. Now in a number of countries, some of these payments are still done in cash. I see a huge potential if governments could convince people, give incentives to people to move these payments to an account and do them electronically. Again, I want to emphasize the word incentivize. I'm not sure I would say that governments should simply close the possibility of doing that in cash. I think people need a choice and we need to coax and convince them a little bit to change, but I think that's possible. Another side of this is of course the payments which go in the other direction. We all make payments to the government. We pay taxes, you pay your public transport fee, your license to watch TV, there's a zillion payments you make to the government. Again, in many countries you can go simply to the post office or to any other place paying cash and get your stuff done. Here, of course, same incentive should apply. Governments could make it much easier for people to do those payments through a bank account or any other account, for example, by offering the possibility of making this automatic. You don't have to do anything, but every six months, every month, whatever payment goes from your account to settle your debts or you pay your health insurance premium or things like that. I think there's a lot of potential there. I think if we think about this and governments initiating these flows or receiving these payment flows, if they have a well-taught out program of moving people from the cash to a transaction account, I think a lot can happen. By the way, I would like to emphasize that your question was very specific on governments and that's where we have maybe the most influence, but of course the same applies to any large collector or payer of bills. I'm thinking of any company employing thousands of people paying out the salaries. I'm thinking of mobile phone companies who have bills every month to collect electricity utility bills. Many people still pay that in cash. Again, these companies could make an effort to convince people to pay those bills whenever they do through the bank account or their e-money account. I see a lot of potential and I think I would say that in our report, this is one of the most important drivers with the most potential. If we really push on this, I think we can give people a reason to change because you can tell people, forget about cash, use an account. You need a reason for that. If you can make a good case for that, I think we can make a great deal of progress. Finally, very briefly, can you tell me a little bit about the PAFI task force, what it is. I believe it's restarted its work and perhaps you can tell us something about the work program. Yes, indeed. It restarted our work in November after publishing the report in April. We waited for it in April 2016. We waited for a while. We thought it was good to collect some experiences. PAFI stands for Payments Aspects of Financial Inclusion. This is a joint report I should emphasise by the committee on payments and markets infrastructure and the World Bank. The World Bank has applied these principles. We have seven guiding principles in the report. One of those I mentioned a minute ago about leveraging these payment streams have been applied in about 14 countries. A lot of information has come out of that and that's why we decided, the World Bank and the CPMI recently, I believe in the November meeting, that we should continue with the work and try to get some more done. So what we are trying to do in the next year and a half is to focus on three things. The first one will be lessons learned. What have we actually learned from those principles out there? How do people think they are? How useful are they? I think a particular thing we need to focus on is certainly my intention to do so, is the developments in the payments world since April 2016. In fact the report was finished a few months earlier of course. Now meaning in particular FinTech evolution, the CPMI and of course other bodies have published in the meantime a number of reports on the use of DLT distributed ledger technology, blockchain as people call it sometimes, digital currencies, instant faster payments, central bank digital currencies. All these new things have been developed and published in the meantime and I think we should revisit if you want our framework and see how far these things are of use. We don't want to engage in a FinTech study on its own but simply see what have we learned, how can we use it. A second stream of the new work will be the measuring progress. It's important to have some kind of indicators to measure progress. It's easy to say you make progress but if you don't know where you were yesterday and you don't know where you will end up tomorrow, how do you define progress? We don't want to overemphasize this in the sense that we would like to make use of existing sources and help countries to find some indicators which are useful for them and maybe put a framework together or something. We certainly don't want to reinvent a new statistical database but I think we can add some value to the existing work there. And finally, the last thing we want to do, the CPMI and the World Bank in this report, in this new work stream, which will lead to a report I'm sure, is to develop a toolkit, guidance you could say the words, whereby we want to look at what are the problems you have encountered in the past with applying the principles. What is difficult to do? Are there gaps, things we forgot to address? If some countries have met problems, how did they solve this? Do we need to make some interpretation of our guiding principles? How can we help facilitate this? So I think it's sort of a toolkit is the word we like to use, sort of a document with boxes or something so that if a country devoting itself to making progress on financial inclusion, it applies the standards or the guidance we give, it has a problem. It can look in a toolkit and say oh but I have this problem, this is maybe what country, X or country, why did, why don't we try it like this. So a very basic hands-on approach to give practical information to people wanting to do something. Thanks very much for these wonderful insights. I look forward to catching up with you again perhaps at the next symposium. But in the meantime, thanks very much for joining us in the studio today. Thank you very much.