 We're now going to hear from Mr. RS Sharma the chairman of India's telecom regulatory authority. Hello, Mr. Sharma Hey, and thank you very much for coming. You're here as part of this week of meetings of the focus group for digital financial Services and well, let's talk about the perspective of India huge population many people who don't have access to Financial services. What do you think is going to change and and to what extent will people be able to access now that the technology is Changing at a very fast rate See, let me Say this there are two major barriers to financial inclusion The first is the inability to prove one's identity because you many people in India do not have formal ID documents And the second one is actually the cost of transactions What has happened is that India has a characteristics that the bottom of the pyramid would have very low value Of course very large volume of transactions. So unless you make these transactions cost effective, it will not be sustainable So these are two major barriers and now of course identity problem has been solved by Adhar Which which basically has issued thus far 950 million identities to more than one point one point two billion out of one point two billion population and the second one is that now we have the the you know one billion plus mobile connections and Mobiles could be used as a very effective instrument of transactions, which will actually reduce the cost So so these are two barriers, which which to some extent have been resolved by India But regulation is often held up as a barrier itself. You're the chairman of the regulatory authority What for you are the main difficulties in this area? I really do not see any difficulty now What has happened is that recently Reserve Bank of India the financial regulator of in India has a given license to 12 payment banks and these payment banks are largely telecom players Now these players have the experience of conducting digital transactions of very small value For example, the the top-up value for a mobile recharge in India today average is about six US cents So that being the case these people are quite experienced in providing these kinds of digital services So I see that a regulation Recently because of this license to payment banks has really worked towards a real financial inclusion of the people I what about security and the the consumer protection experience? Is this area digital financial services? Is this something in which the majority of the Indian population have trust now or is there still some reticence? The very fact that India today has one billion plus mobile connections Is the proof of one of the fact that Indians are pretty good when it comes to technology you give them technology and they adapt to it Similarly, I think that once you create an architecture of Financial transactions which are as easy to do as making a phone call for example Then of course you have the architecture in place and it should be possible And that should not work as a barrier to do the transactions as to the question of security I think the very nature of these digital transactions because the authentication is is absolutely secure and it is biometric Many a times if you can case you want to have larger value transactions Otherwise mobile can work as as one of the factors of authentication and therefore in this scenario I think it's a pretty safe and and non reputable kind of transactions which which can be done And technology again helps in reducing the cost. What's going to change in this area. We'll be seeing more merchants accepting cash less payments via mobile devices Well, what are you seeing in terms of the technology over the next few years? See my view is that India has got two verticals, you know people often talk about India's cash addiction Which means you know people use cash more and there are two verticals to that one is the You know the the people who want to hide something and they want to do some tax because they want to avoid taxes and Another vertical is the vertical of rural poor people Who has no you have no problems in doing a cash cash less transactions provided you provide an opportunity for that And what I feel is that the this kind of banking the digital frugal banking is really going to change the way people in rural areas Transact a poor person would certainly like to save money and if he has access to easy banking is Neighborhood grocery store owner is the mobile banker Then he could go and deposit money there and certainly again when he goes to buy stuff next time He can pay through mobile, you know peer-to-peer transfer So therefore what I see as happening is that in the days ahead There will be huge Spurred in the low value large volume Cashless transactions taking place in the rural India. Okay, so huge changes of foot in India So what is the added value of you being involved in this international process here at the ITU? Well, I think it's a great effort of the digital financial services You know this group which has been created at ITU and and whatever deliberations I had today in the morning I at of course, this is my first time to participate in this But but what I see is that there is a concerted effort to kind of learn from each other's you know experiences and And we are certainly there to Participate in this process India has done a lot of work in the identity space in the transaction space We have now what is called a unified payment infrastructure interface What it means is that there is an architecture which is interoperable which is open And based on open standards which allows any You know any kind of address to any address transactions any bank to any bank transactions And that is something we'll be very happy to share with the DFS group of the ITU Well, thank you very much for coming to talk to us today And thank you very much for coming to Geneva to take part in this process. Thank you very much. You're welcome