 Good evening and welcome, we're at day three of the Fiji Symposium in Bangalore, the platform for all dialogue on financial inclusion. And with me today is the head of DFS Observatory from the Columbia Business School, New York, Dr Leon Perlman. Welcome, Leon, and thank you for being part of the Fiji Symposium. It's my absolute pleasure. Good to be here. It's the first Fiji Symposium ever, and what are your thoughts on this? Well, I'm seeing very familiar faces because I was part of the DFS focus group, part of putting it together. I was head of a work group. So this is to me as a continuation of the very good work that we did in the focus group and the core team that I had in the focus group are part of the Fiji grouping. So I'm hoping to work with them in similar and other advanced projects. That's great. Thank you for all that you're leading. A couple of work groups. Which ones are these? So I'm co-chair of the DLT, Distributed Literature Technology work group, looking at some regulatory, legal and security issues. And co-chair of the infrastructure working group, looking at some infrastructure security issues that are percolated out. And again, this follows up from work that we did in the focus group. So we're now continuing with that at a more granular level, looking at solutions. Oh, that's nice. So we just get into your area of expertise then. I have a few questions for you. How is SS7 and USSD security important to digital financial services? Well, that's a very good question. We year in India, 60% of the market use feature phones. Feature phones, you cannot really load apps on them. So you have to use USSD. USSD is based on a technology, as you mentioned, called SS7, signaling system 7, which was developed in the 70s. Unfortunately without any security. So that's actually correct. So now we're building a financial infrastructure on something that has no security. So you can see there's a slight disconnect. And our job is to find where the vulnerabilities are and protect the ecosystem because people's money from any vulnerabilities that might impact them on generally loss of funds or on confidence of the system. So we're going to be with feature phones for a while. So the USSD as a basis for interacting with your money is going to be with us for a while. And make everybody more confident in the system by mitigating those risks and preventing it where possible. Okay. And how far do you think it's going to come and how long do you think it's going to take? Well, as I said, I've got my good team. We've got some very experienced computer scientists who know this topic pretty well. In fact, there's some whitehead hackers we call them who look at this from a very granular level and actually try and intrude in with permission into these systems and see where the vulnerabilities are. So we at the start of the process, but we've already seen where we possibly want to go in so far as fixing the issues. Okay. So let's move on to what are the security implications of the use of distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain in digital financial services? That's again a very good question. Blockchain distributed ledger technology is of course the term everybody uses and it's very exciting and there's lots of uses for it, which is great. But we need to be mindful that it's new technology. And in a lot of cases, it's open source technology where there's no software company developing with a distinct quality of service. It's people developing it. That's one side of the equation. There are of course other more industrial versions of it where it's built with specific fit for purpose by specific companies, say for the financial sector. So you've got the open source versus the fit for purpose, industrial strength. And those two sometimes connect, interoperability between the blockchains. So when you've got possibly an open source version connecting with the industrial strength version, you might have a weakest link issue and you need that interoperability. You also need external inputs and that might introduce vulnerabilities. What we're seeing on the encryption layer is that although with existing technologies, the encryption is pretty robust. I say that with a caveat, you never know. Could be tomorrow morning, something is hacked. But what we're seeing is a development or something called quantum computing, which gives rise to exponential computing power. And you've got brute force attacks on existing encryption technology. It's not here yet. The academic papers, the industry papers say it's close, maybe a year or two, but that is implications for what we're developing, especially because it's money. And a lot of central banks are looking at issuing what's called digital fiat currencies, which are blockchain based. And we need to make sure that that's bulletproof in terms of its security. So make sure that the encryption is solid and people are confident in the money. And that's what looks like it's going to happen in the future, I guess. Yes, well, we want to make it bulletproof. Yeah, that's the plan. That's the plan. And part of the work group is also looking at the regulatory implications and the legal implications, which is sort of like companion, complementary to the security side of things because they do affect each other. And because it's new, as I said, a lot of these issues haven't been ventilated or even solved because people are just getting their heads around what this technology is and what the implications are. So the legal implications, for example, would be on these things called smart contracts, which self-execute. Once you start them, they just go. So what we're looking at is what happens if something goes wrong, where the liability is, contractual implications, notarization, useful for blockchain and DLTs. Blockchain, a bit like DFS, touches a lot of our lives in a different way. So contractual, notarization, money, and the legal implications to everything. And that's what we're looking at, just connecting the dots in terms of what the legal implications of this technology are. Yeah. And the more advancement in technology, the more legal issues that are going to keep coming up and more security issues. Gives us busy. Yep. And that's the plan. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your time. My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much.