 Welcome to the Fiji Symposium 2019 in Cairo, Egypt, where I'm very pleased to be joining the studio by Mahabahu, who is the CEO of Jopak, the Jordan Payments and Clearing Company. Welcome to the studio. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. Now I'd like to talk to you a little bit about the fact that a lot of people basically still don't prefer digital services over cash. And I wanted to ask you what do you think it will take for the world's poorest people to be able to take that leap of faith and basically prefer digital financial services over cash? And will digital financial services be enough to make this happen? Let's start with the first part of the question. No, I don't think digital financial services are sufficient enough to drive this preference for poor people, especially poor people. They don't see the hidden costs associated by dealing with cash. They only feel that cash is very safe, secure, especially in safe countries. And it doesn't cost anything, especially for face-to-face payments. However, for remote payments, they don't see that. They don't see that they can do transactions from home. So basically, they cannot afford extra fees. They feel it tangible. Thereby, I don't think it will be unless the tangible benefits of digital financial services are very clear to them. Unless the designer of these services would be more into customer-centric to see what they need, exactly what they need, how to fulfill their requirements and needs, how to meet their expectations, and how to serve them and solve existing problems or risks. Other than that, I don't think it will work with digital financial services. So let's talk about the benefits. What would be the immediate benefits to them? Many benefits. One of them is to create some kind of digital identity with some history, financial history. Because financial history in the financial area is exactly like your national identity. So you cannot get any kind of facilities or benefit from the formal financial services unless you have some kind of history and due diligence where they can conduct this. So from this dealing with formal financial services, especially digital financial services, everything is recorded, well-recorded. And with the computation power and the data science recently, many of the algorithms can be run to calculate their exact risks. So they can be treated fairly enough according to their risk and according to their behavior in the market. Adding to that remotely transactions, especially for those who have people living in the distance places or those who collect funds from government or NGOs or salaries or anything. So those who receive frequent income or money, they would need it and they need as well to spend digitally. So even if there is some kind of fees, but definitely it will be trivial compared to the benefits they will be incurring. Adding to that, if a place to store and many other things. So it's a collective ecosystem where benefits cannot be calculated. So to avoid being shut out essentially, they really need to start adopting this. Of course there's been talk very much of how many people have mobile phones but are still not accessing the internet. But there are also differences in the technology as well. There are smartphones but there are also just the standard phones as well. So people have to be able to adapt and I think also of course the technologies have to adapt as well to them. In terms of regulation, what should regulators be thinking about in order to enable this digital financial environment? Whether you're talking about regulators in specific countries or regulators worldwide, they can do a lot as well together. In the specific country, regulators should subsidize these kinds of services to make like maximum amount of fees for example. Or to mandate micro payment or important payments, paying for example for basic utilities to be free. Because other kinds of services should compensate the revenues from other services. Governments can work with other regulators or the financial regulator with other regulators on making sure that the whole ecosystem is harmonized and sustained. The telecom regulator, the financial regulator, anything related to data privacy and data protection, the consumer protection controllers. So they have to do a lot, not what they can do. They have to consider everything. Even they need to mandate full interoperability, so poor people to avoid the caching out expenses. They need more digital liquidity within the system. So it's not only about me having digital money. It's about how to spend these money without incurring cash out fees and so basically another one that many countries including mine, they are committing a huge mistake by giving the signal that your income tax or sales tax should be like this. Look, the digital your digital purchases are 5 percent or this amount we assume is 5 percent and the total is 95. And this is really jeopardizing many of the efforts into digital financial services because many of the merchants now are reluctant to accept digital payments. So even the governments, they should be smart enough to even maybe give up part of sales income for example for the benefit of other development and social benefits in the economy. So not only to focus on one area of financial inclusion becoming a buzzword, it's even the associated benefits of moving from cash and paper based economy, even plastic based into more fully digital ecosystem. Later on by time things would correct each other and people will feel it's safe and secured and convenient and speed. Later the government can tackle task evasion but don't make it as a stopper and hindering your efforts from early stages. Absolutely. Great words of encouragement and a wisdom. Well thank you very much for joining us in the studio today and we hope to catch up with you again some stage in the future. Thank you. It's my pleasure.