 We have an exciting discussion ahead of us on digital currency distributed ledger technology and cross-border payments and a fantastic panel here to talk to us about this interesting and wide-ranging set of topics. I'll read through everybody's bios and then we'll have short remarks by each of the panelists before we do some discussion on the panel and then open it up for Q&A. So immediately here to my right is Dr. Nunguz, who is the Executive Director of the African Economic Research Consortium, a Pan-African Premier Capacity Building Network. He's an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, and is the immediate former Governor of the Central Bank of Kenya, where he served two four-year terms as required by law from 2007 to 2015. He has been a member of the Global Advisory Council of the World Economic Forum and a visiting fellow of practice at Oxford University. Prior to his appointment as Governor, he was the Director of Training at the African Economic Research Consortium. He also worked at the International Development Research Center of Canada as a Regional Program Specialist for Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office in 2001 and the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis in 1999 as a Principal Economist. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Immediately to his left is Governor Ingvez from Riggs Bank, where he is the Chairman of the Executive Board. He's also a member of the Board of Directors of BIS and Chairman of BIS Banking and Risk Management Committee. He's a member of the General Board of the European Systemic Risk Board, member of the General Council, excuse me, of the ECB and Governor for Sweden in the IMF and Board Member of the Nordic Baltic Macro Prudential Forum. In 2018, Mr. Ingvez was appointed Chairman of the Toronto Center for Global Leadership in Financial Supervision. He was previously the Chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, Director of the Monetary and Financial Systems Department at the IMF, Deputy Governor of the Riggs Bank and General Director of the Swedish Bank Support Authority. Prior to that, he was Undersecretary and Head of the Finance Markets Department at the Ministry of Finance, and he owns a PhD in Economics. And last but not least, we have Abdel Banda, who is the founder and CEO of Banyan Infrastructure. Founded in 2017, Banyan Infrastructure utilizes machine learning algorithms and distributed ledger technology to encode natural language financial contracts into smart contracts to provide lenders with an integrated SaaS solution for autonomous tracking and reporting of contractual requirements contained in credit agreements used to finance distributed infrastructure systems and transportation assets. As CEO, he is responsible for the company's strategic corporate and market development. Mr. Banda also serves as Director of Africa for Edison Schwes Offshore, the leading U.S. shipbuilder and marine contractor to the offshore energy industry. As Schwes, he supports the company's strategic finance initiatives and previously led the company's corporate and business development efforts in Africa. Prior to coming to Schwes, he was an analyst at San Laro Newell & Partners, an investment banking firm in New York. He's also the co-founder and trustee of Students Bridging the Information Gap, a 501 C3 in the U.S. celebrating its 10th anniversary building computer labs and libraries for Ghanaian orphanages and schools. He holds a B.A. in Finance from the University of Notre Dame, where, dare I mention here, he also played football. No fights. No fights. This is a peaceful conference. As I said, we're going to have everyone start with some opening remarks. Dr. Indungu is going to lead us off. Good afternoon. I'm not so sure. When you speak after lunch, I don't know how to make sure that everybody is going to be engaged. But let me say that I'm very happy to be here. And I think I've shared so many emails with Christie and Michael. And so I think I like the team. They're very, very efficient. And so I'm very happy to be here. It's my first time to be in Detroit and the University of Michigan. So I'm very happy that I was able to be invited here. I was told to talk about digital evolution, especially I wanted to talk about e-money and electronic payments ecosystem. And I wanted to give the Kenyan example. But it's because this is the fourth year I've been away from the central bank. And it looks like everything is following me up. If you look at the my greatest papers, actually, most of the papers are focusing on that because everybody has been asking me right on this. My greatest paper was to talk about state and just talk about digital technology and state and institutional capacity in the global center for global development. It's because this subject matter is actually coming at a time when everybody is excited about the innovations that are taking place. And I think maybe once I share the Kenyan experience, you'll see how actually even the way we look at it in terms of, I know there is always this confusion about cryptocurrencies and also the domestic currencies. And I always tell people that let's not go there. There's a boundary. If domestic, for example, in Africa, even domestic currency, slides to the dollar or even to the euro by 10%, there will be a commission of inquiry. And I've went through so many of those. Parliamentary commission of inquiry, why did the exchange rate slide? It changes massive relative price structures. But we have seen Bitcoin just crash and then there's no commission. I don't know who can provide the commission of inquiry. But anyway, we'll debate about that. Then before I go into the subject matter, when you change your jobs, you also have to remember actually to pay some form of marketing. And this is where this is AERC, African Economic Research Consortium. It's a collaborative network. We've been there building capacity in Africa for the last that one years now. And we've built capacity through research and graduate training, collaborating with public universities in Sub-Saharan Africa. And we also have an interactive communication and an outreach program that is to disseminate to the policymakers in terms of our research output. We have managed to build capacity in Africa, in Sub-Saharan Africa, to the point where most of the institutions that you see have been strengthened just because of that capacity. I'm one of those products and there are so many others that we can talk about. But anyway, it's good to talk about it because this is also going to be an area of collaboration in terms of research. And the people who sit in front here are not likely to see the slides. But anyway, let me talk about, let me go into this electronic payments ecosystem because that's where I want to start. But my first point, when I entered the central bank in 2007, I was faced with this issue about what are we going to do with the request to actually license mobile phone financial services payments. But most people didn't understand it that way. It was called M-Pesa. But I want to show you M-Pesa is just one product. But the idea stretches far much wider. But the other aspect I was faced with was how do we ignite financial inclusion? And I remember calling CEOs of banks who are also my friends, what we need to do. And one of the topical issues that came up is how do we bring branch networks to the people? We tried, even trying to say brick and mortar is expensive, but we can actually minimize how much we can do. The second thing was agency banking. I sent a group of a team of people to Brazil and Colombia. Within two weeks, they came up with draft regulations about agency banking. But when M-Pesa hit the ground, it was a coordinating mechanism for all those. But that is the most important point. But my first point here is that yesterday I listened to women banking and the presentation and talked about even dormancy of accounts. Even today, we suffer from dormancy of account. We thought that financial inclusion was opening accounts in the banking system. But I think that the new direction that M-Pesa gave us is that you need a transactions account. Savings comes later when you have surplus. You can include everyone once you have an efficient retail electronic payment system. And that's the starting point. That's what M-Pesa is all about. The second thing is that we have talked, since yesterday, I've listened to very nice debate. And I thought that you need to recognize in countries like Africa where we have market segmentation. You need a product that can navigate across market segments. And it's going to be very difficult. Banks are not going to those market segments because market segmentation is defined either distance to the market or even levels of income and maybe a combination of so many other factors. But anyway, that is maybe that's why when I talk about electronic payment system, I will of course come up with why we call it a retail electronic payment system. I want to show that it is actually the entry point in terms of financial services. And then after that, we can talk about financial inclusion and then what happens to the ecosystem after that. So essentially, even though I have some slides here, I don't intend to go through them one by one. But the most important thing is just to point out some few things that I like and I've liked. I've seen the World Bank came up with a new methodology of trying to analyze payments instruments. And we were so happy about even the survey that has been done. And I've looked also at surveys that have been done outside the World Bank, like in Canada, for example, how much a cash will cost in terms of distribution and all that. But I'm happy to share with you one of the recent examples that have been done, especially in Albania, is that once you migrate or let's say when you are using physical instruments, the consumers pay almost 50% of the cost of that of the transactions. But when you move to electronic payments, actually that 50% shifts to the infrastructure providers. So it's an idea that actually electronic payments system themselves are becoming cheaper to the consumers. The whole issue is if you have the physical infrastructure, then you can talk about scalability. But then retail electronic payments, and this is where I come in, is in 2003 the Central Bank of Kenya was given an extra mandate that is to ensure, to make sure that you have a safe, efficient payment system that will support a successful financial inclusion goal. And then all of a sudden we started looking at how do we bring up a payment system, a national payment system, which was not part of the core mandate at the very beginning. And so it means that you start with the Rigo framework. And the Rigo framework, by the time it started in 2003, by the time I went to the Central Bank in 2007, it has not even been approved by a parliament. And parliament is one of those institutions that it's going to be very difficult to push. But we wanted a payment system or a transactions platform that was going to be important in terms of the entry point. And it's also going to be real time. And also, of course, the emerging evidence has shown that if you actually have a successful financial inclusion, then of course when you talk about financial inclusion, which is actually market accessibility, it makes a difference. I'll talk about the mobile phone based data. But the most important thing is that we have seen the successes, maybe I can proclaim that the success we have seen is that financial inclusion has been effective because of having a very well, maybe well, should I say, accepted retail electronic payment system. And beyond that, it has actually generated its own life because essentially it has come up with products that are accessible. I've seen studies that have shown that women can actually enter that space and save in products that cannot be encroached. And that for us is very, very important. And we have also shown that when women take up that, they are efficient savers. The cycles between savings and investment are reduced. And I think there's a study by somebody, Tavernit Suri in MIT and Jack Suri in Washington. They have come up with a paper to show that. Actually 2% of the households in Kenya have been lifted from poverty. So essentially financial inclusion becomes a public policy that actually can help us in terms of sustainable poverty reduction. But let me talk about the Kenyan case because I just want to be very brief here. There are four stages in Kenyan case. And then M-Pesa, you know, Sophie talked about that there was a need for the corporate, the SafariCom is MNO, to actually increase their, it's a need to serve the market in the right way. But actually, SafariCom just took it on the, from the air. Actually, the whole issue is SafariCom had a nice system of prepared air time. And all of a sudden, everybody started trading with the air time. Then one microfinance realized that if my customers don't have to come to the city, they can use the air time to pay for their owns, then they don't have to come and we can do that. But then there was one catch. We have to approach SafariCom to create aggregators so that several people can send their air time and somebody can aggregate and send it to the microfinance. That's how they went to MicroSafe to do the analysis. I think this has been documented by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, like some people who have done some good work. I was trying to document this case study in Oxford and that is where the starting point comes in. And SafariCom realizes, oh, this could be a good case. Let's try to research. And that's how DFID comes in to provide some intervention. That is where I started. But now, we've talked about legal framework. It only became changed into M-Pesa in 2006 when the government changed the law or made it the law to recognize electronic units of money and electronic signatures. That is what changed the style, although it could have been a better trade, to send your air time. We know the equivalent amount and then we can transform it into amount. Anyway, that's a story that is for another day, but that is the starting point. The SafariCom actually realized that it could take advantage and that is good advantage because so far, we have seen how it has been successful. Let me summarize what four stages in this. The first stage was just transfer, P2P government or even firms to P, payments for goods and services. But for me, the most important point about this stage is that there was a retail electronic payments platform which was sufficient and it was safe. I've seen colleagues in the world, some friends in the World Bank and even Oxford University, Lawrence Crain and the Corrine Mayor, they came to the conclusion that actually in Kenya, liquidity distribution is taking place outside the banking sector, outside the banking hall. And that was a very important contribution because it was actually because of the agent model, the master agent model. Again, there's a lot of information behind that. You can talk about master agent information model and how they resolve the liquidity problem. So in a sense, the novelty of these stages, the transactions account became actually, sorry, the trust account became the transactions account. It was the retail electronic payments platform that became very, very important. And the telecoms were just the transmission background, backbone. I've gone to several African countries and they come and tell me that we want a bank red model, not a telco led model. And I always tell them that telcos were just the transmission backbone. What is that all of the telcos? They change cash in electronic units of cash and store it in the trust account which is in the commercial bank. So they just, that is their main function. And they are regulated with the guidance that the central bank provides plus the communication authority. The rest is left for the central bank to actually manage the payment system. The second stage is factual savings account. I remember Bill Gates himself really pushed us talking about, oh, you have been very successful with M-Pesa, yes, but it is not even affecting the intermediation in the banking sector. It is not going to affect people's lives because essentially people's lives are going to be affected by one savings, two credit because they can enlarge their asset base and escape psychos of poverty. And then the next thing is that it's expensive. Unit cost was very expensive. How do you actually turn it into a savings platform? And it worked. I remember promising Bill that if you work, just give us some time and it's going to work. Thank you, no time. So the virtual savings account was a little magic but the next thing was use transactions data and the savings data to generate credit scores for use for short-term credit. I think this is the part I like most. And today, and I've been telling people that we have seen that the virtual savings account and the virtual credit supply platform has moved to five countries. It moved from Kenya to Tanzania because Komachi Bank of Africa was there. It moved to Uganda. It moved to Ghana, sorry, to Rwanda. And now it has moved to Kodiwa. You can imagine. I have been looking at that even micro data. For example, in Rwanda when it was formed, there were 9,000 loan applications every day and they were approved. And the turnaround time was not more than 45 seconds. And the average loan was about $5. And the payments period was 21 days. And then NPAs were very low. And the fourth one is the cross-border. This is the interesting bit because we allowed Western Union can only send money to the banking platforms. And then after that, you have to actually travel to Nairobi or any other station to get your money. Now you can get it in your mobile phone. Anyway, having said that, I want just to talk about five outcomes. First, I've already talked about the first one, literary electronic payment system, which is effective, efficient, transparent, and safe. This is very important. The second one is financial inclusion and even financial development has taken place. And we can talk about poverty reduction. We can talk about even something that I'll talk about later about even the effectiveness of monetary policy. I went to the central bank and actually when I looked at the accounts, the banking accounts, and even who was borrowing and who was lending, there were just like 3.4 million accounts for a population of about 30 million. Then I asked myself, why do we complain about the banking sector and the reading rates? Because nobody is going to the banks. Anyway, that's for another day, but we'll talk about it. But even I went to the central bank when AML CFT regime in Kenya was so bad and we tried to improve on it using this. And then because of time, sustainable business models, I'm very happy about this. We can talk about this. Fintechs, this is where Fintechs comes in. They can roll out products, even payments platform for other sectors of the economy. We have already made a contribution about tax policy and even fiscal policy design, public finance, with the IMF there is a volume in 2017. We talked about even provided the Kenyan case study in terms of how even the fiscal, the Kenya Revenue Authority was designing tax payments platforms on the basis of these retro electronic platforms. And finally, even the government was designing e-government services based on that. Because I have to finish, let me talk about, my last paper has focused on four areas. And this is something that we can talk about, leprechaverity across from the experiences in Kenya and East Africa, we can even talk about the rest of Africa. I've talked about this in so many areas, but let me focus on four areas. One of them is connectivity. And since yesterday I've heard about this. Inclusiveness allows us also connectivity. You know, the government provided the physical infrastructure. That's about optic across urban centers. But the core infrastructure is the one that moved the payment system to where it is. The second one is interoperability. This is a market conduct thing. And of course, the Kenyan case stands out, but it's a whole issue of saying, how do we ensure interoperability? We, interoperability will increase the market size and also our unit cost. But other issues must come in, but we have to look at that. Then, of course, transformative regulatory technology, that is something that I've always said. There's somebody who mentioned that if you cannot allow innovation in the market, then obviously the market cannot work. Electronic ID system in Kenya, we succeeded because of ID, but to secure the market, we need to move to electronic payment system. And the final one, and very important for me, is state and institutional capacity to regulate. There are risks that I imagine. And I'll give you a story because I don't want to talk about it more than, abuse my authority more than that. By the time I was living in the central bank, I told the government, and I even talked to the president, telling him that we have to regulate the betting, online betting, because it can come to hurt the financial system. We have to tell the regulator, I've already written several letters to the regulator for the betting, but they didn't listen. Of course, the betting companies went to parliament and the marshaled the MPs, so that the raw was not fast. And then in the end, what happens? So now, as we stand now, there are more than three million Kenyans that are blacklisted because of betting online and borrowing through the virtual credit. The problem is that if you just open up and say these banks must actually provide food provisioning, it would be a major credit risk. But for me, those are the points that we would like to replicate across the African economies. These are the points we would like to make sure that we safeguard, but this is what is going to help in terms of this digital evolution. Thank you very much. Sorry for what I'm using. You know, but of course, you don't know, I traveled very far. I would be, it will be very bad if I only traveled this far to come and talk for 10 minutes, but I don't want to argue about it. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, please. I'll take your request to participate here. I couldn't just if I want the future of the 2019. And my institution has been around in 1668. And it would like to be around for another 350 years. So it was just in the system. And back then 350 years ago, people were carrying around 22 pound copper coins. 22 pound copper coins. No way, 22 kilos. It's about 50 pounds. And that's very impractical. So they even had the paper money. And now the issue is what happens when paper money goes away. So that's what we're doing in the years. The other one is as was mentioned, I'm for the chairman of the Ropo Center for Music Training of Supervisors and BABA 50 CEOs sitting over there. We deal a lot with financial inclusion, which is also one of the conference and conference. And so far, the Ropo Center in the years has trained around 12,000 supervisors. They've all opened up all of them. And finally, not please, I'm back. I was here back in 1971. Because then I went to high school in Saginaw, Michigan. And that's where my accent comes from. It was one combination of Saginaw and the sweet cook in the Muppet Train. And I said, I sounded like you. And you know. But to the topic, I, of course, talked about these things from a central diapers perspective. And central bags, they produce a public good for many different public goods. Because we provide monetary stability, we provide financial stability. We provide settlement. And this is important in safe central bank money. And we issue notes and codes. In many parts of the world, these things are sort of more properly not everywhere all the time. But there are some issues that all of us struggle with. And at the global level, one issue that comes back again and again and again and that's the copy of this panel is cross-border payments. And another one is sort of a combination of financial inclusion and cross-border payments. And how to deal with that. And then you combine that with arguments and discussions about new technologies available and how potentially to use those new technologies in this context. Two things come to my mind when it comes to this, that where we really need to get out of the public sector. One is settlement system for cross-border payments. And here in the central banking community, at least my view is that we have not been ambitious enough. And that's because central banks have a national mandate. Central banks never have a cross-border mandate on anything. Because all of us carry our own history in our backpacks. And that has been an impediment that we need to do in these things in a better way than what we see here. The other one, which is completely outside what central banks do, but it's incredibly important it doesn't really create a pattern area today. And that is that in order to do everything digital, you actually need to have, need to have a secure online identification of individuals and companies. You actually need a national digital ID. Because if you can't explain to others who you are in a digital form, forget about know your customer, money laundering and all the rest. Now, if my view is that central banks have not done enough, then what one would expect happening in this field is that as happens, everybody, each other, realize, hey, there is a vacuum there, and we can make some money out of filling this vacuum with something. Well, then exactly, that's what happens. That's where you get Lidra and Ripple and Bitcoin and utility settlement coin and all the rest of it, you name it. And that's not at all surprising because then you say, okay, let's see if we can capitalize on this, given that we have mastered these technologies. But then what does that mean when it comes to the future, central banking, well, first of all, we need to accept that within this field, we have failed and that's why Lidra and others showed up out of the blue. And that really has put a fire under central bankers and scratching our heads now, what's next and what to do. Now, having said that, one also means to be mindful of the fact that central bankers are probably not the fastest animals in the financial ecosystem. But when they move, they can move with force. And that's because central banks produce a public goods and public goods are usually not, if history gives us any guidance, provided in a good way by the private sector. So what the private sector does tends to either create monopolies or these systems crash sooner or later in one form or another. And the reason for that is very, very simple and very basic in everything dealing with money requires legal support because money is not technology. Money is what we have in our heads up here. That is how we define money. And the public sector has the monopoly power to produce new laws. So you need the support of parliament to make that happen in one way or another. So essentially the issue we're talking about is how to combine legal frameworks with the technology available and then discuss what is a public good and what is not a public good. Now on the issue of real time settlement systems, let me just mention one example and what I think is doable in the future. Quite recently the ECB has set up its TIPS real time small value settlement system. So you can send money within 10 seconds all over Europe, not used very much. It's a multi-currency system. We're presently discussing with the ECB and within a year, year and a half or so. I hope that we can use this system for settlement from one cell phone to another in Swedish prologue. Now if it takes 10 seconds to settle a transaction or five or something, it's fast. In Swedish prologue, and then you can do the same thing in euros, you probably don't have to be always rather to realize that it must be possible then to move between prologue and euros back and forth. Also within 10 seconds. So I'm just looking for somebody on the private sector side who would be willing to do that. And if no one shows up on the private sector side, the central banks themselves certainly can be worked on. But have you done that? Well then that of course also means that you have to be able to define who you are. And you have to adhere to the money, anti-money laundering legislation and all the rest of it. And that means that you have to have online identification systems in one form or another. And that's why I think the Indian example is so incredibly important when it comes to thinking about it. It's not the private sector only when it comes to doing this. The other one which was also a bit of a distraction is that if you start doing this across order, you need to harmonize. Because say for example, a transaction from one cell phone to another in Sweden, you can't do the same thing from one cell phone in Sweden to one in Germany or vice versa, one in Denmark. Then you actually have to agree on the standards and how to do that. Technically, it's a piece of paper. But then you have to get a bunch of people around the table and they have to agree on something. And particularly in my point of the world, if you are wealthy enough, you really don't have to agree to do anything at least for a while until you get boring enough so that you realize that somebody else is running faster than you. You run it yourself. So you have to have interoperability in one form or the other. And why is this something that is important to us? Let me give you some numbers, some examples. Cash is on its way out. Cash as a share of cash at the point of sale presently is down to 13% of transactions. 40% of the people never use cash at all. And if you talk to retailers, restaurants, and hotels, many of them sort of say that we're probably out of cash completely by 2025. Not because somebody has decided that that's the way it's going to go. It's just that it's so much more convenient to use technology. And particularly when I'm talking there is international for people come up to me and sort of hint that I'm the guy who has decided that we're getting out of cash. Who has decided this? And I say no one has decided. It's the convenience factor that actually produces this over time. And here on the central banking side, we have to think hard about why is this happening? Is it because we central bankers use old-fashioned technology to pay for money? Or is there something else in this that we need to deal with when it comes to providing two things? One is payment systems. Real-time payment systems. And the other one is moving out of cash into electronic claim, retail claims on the central bank in one form or the other. Central bank digital debt, digital price. One issue that we struggle with and it was also mentioned in the earlier panel, which is quite important, is that moving away from cash also means that earlier you talked about financial inclusion. But these new systems also actually de facto produce financial extinction because it just becomes too hard to use these systems for people with various types of disabilities. And so far, what I have seen on the private sector side and the private sector's willingness to actually produce systems that everybody can use is just not there. Because there's not enough money introducing apps and other tools available for people with disabilities. Because if you have a choice at the national level of producing something that a few hundred thousand people can use, or if you have millions or billions that it takes you to figure out what people will do. Now, so those are some of the issues that are important. There is one more very critical issue, I think when it comes to moving into digital money in one form or the other, and that is who defines what money is. Most people take this for granted so they have never ever thought about it. Because if you have an idea what money is, but talk to the lawyers and when they scratch on the surface, they just can't come up with an answer that makes sense. So we have some competition with parliament saying that the last time you dealt with this, first time I think you dealt with this in parliament was 1809, and then you sort of came back in 1904. And now physical cash is disappearing and physical cash is legal tender. That's essentially how you define the unit of account, the Swedish program. And if physical cash disappears, then what is a Swedish program? Nobody really knows. So we have written to parliament and said that like it or not, this is what you do in parliaments every hundred years, you have to think about this. And now since you have to be here, it's your time to think about this and what to do. And what we really, really will need in the future is a legally clear definition of legal tender in an electronic world. Because if we don't have that definition, we don't know what we have. Now, why is it that I'm talking about this from this perspective? That's because I'm a central banker and it's my job to produce a good called the Swedish program. And it's my job to ensure that it's good stuff that we produce. Because most people never think about money this way, but money is comparable to apples. They should produce good apples, people buy them, they could produce bad apples, they go somewhere else. And it's my job to make sure that we, in my country, don't dollarize or start using the Euro or any other currency. That would be a complete failure or failure on my side. So part of my job is to make sure that we get the plumbing right so that people continue for another 350 years to use the stuff that we produce. Thank you. So earlier today, many people have brought up the why of financial inclusion. And I think Mr. Vanda here will help us think about some of the things that the governor and the former governor said and help us extrapolate to why some of this stuff is important in some of the private sector applications that come from this. Can everybody hear me? Is that it? Hello? So I'm gonna talk about financial inclusion within the broader context of infrastructure. One, the global infrastructure deficit and also the current cultural and economic prioritization of sustainable infrastructure development. I'd like to say a big thank you to the Gates Foundation, University of Michigan for having me here today. Truly an honor on behalf of the rest of the team of body and infrastructure to be considered worthy of speaking active to central bank governors. This is not my first time at Michigan. Last time I was here, 2006. And we're not gonna recall the score of that game. I left a very sad man that day. But that same year, there was some interesting developments in the world. Let me hope you're not the UN Secretary General at the time who passed away two years ago. I was in Ghana last year towards funeral and it was a very sad day for me growing up in Ghana when he was announced as UN Secretary General 1997. It was a very, very big deal for the country. And as a nine year old at the time, it really opened my eyes to a whole new world of possibilities when you start to think about where your future options might be. And it's never been lost on me that I was one of the few people in Ghana, few kids in Ghana at the time that had access to electricity and cable network views. So I had the opportunity to have access to that information and I helped shape my world of view in such a profound manner. And when you think about that within the broader context of 800 million people being without electricity in Africa today, despite $120 trillion of capital, institutional capital in the world that's seeking long dated, yielding, asset-backed investments, it tells you that something is broken. And at Banyan infrastructure around the nation, the harness of power of technology has enabled the financial community to help bridge that gap in funding the infrastructure gap. Simultaneously, I'm sure if you saw this last week, a group representing 30% of global banking signed on to a new charter where they're committing to prioritizing environmental and social governance as part of all their new lending practices. This is a watershed moment for the issue of climate change because in order to truly try to address climate change we need to think about retooling the current infrastructure that we have. And when you consider that and the already existing deficit in infrastructure spending, there's a real issue that needs to be considered the highest levels of government and the highest levels of finance because it's going to require a lot of natural resources to bridge that gap. So at Banyan infrastructure and even thanks for the introduction, what we've done is we spent a lot of time studying what some of the challenges were and the government, I think this was said, money and value really is about law. It's about contracts, it's about agreements, it's about exchange, property rights. So we've taken the view of trying to understand the legal structures around project connects. But we've noticed infrastructure projects have become smaller over time. We're no longer building billion-dollar coal plantations, more is going to be an amalgamation of $20 to $50 million of smaller solar wind projects and the cost to lenders to manage a bunch of bespoke and heterogeneous loan agreements to bridge this gap, particularly in light of regulation coming out of the global financial crisis without requiring ongoing due diligence on every single loan. This is becoming a hindrance to lenders. So we've taken the view of harnessing power of distributed ledger to bridge that gap. So what we do is we convert loan agreements into smart contracts. Then we connect those loan agreements with the sensors on the line assets that are funded and as all agreements on amalgamation of clauses that are data dependent, we're able to use the real-time sensitive data to automate all the contractual agreements and clauses, all contractual clauses within the agreements we've built a dashboard that gives lenders real-time covenant tracking and reporting on how each individual loan is performing. This has been very well received with lenders. We're working with reference for lenders in the U.S. and Europe. We're currently approaching half-definition of loans on the platform. And we started going to market in March. It's been a strategy that seems to be more over-received, but there's a bigger story here. There's a very small startup. I'll watch if you want to care about all this. Interfering what we're doing with all the new initiatives and we've discussed over the last couple of days starts to now reshape the financial system of making one nimble in order to allow it to address societal challenges. So in the issue of digital payments, as we're able to connect digital payment systems to our network, we now allow a lender to have a much more perfected lean on cash flows. Constructuring these deals, lenders are using the law to try to find innovative ways to perfect the limits. But by digitizing the contracts, automating reporting, we now add another layer, another tool which lenders can use to try to perfect that linear. So as a woman in Kenya pays for water or electricity with a pencil, once that's digitized and is connected to the smart contract, an asset manager in New York or a stock home can now rely on code to perfect lean on that cash flow to that asset, which that makes lenders much more comfortable bundling up and securitizing these small loans which opens up a lot of liquidity and allows for the funds to flow in order to bridge this massive infrastructure gap. So the other thing that we started doing since we started integrating a bunch of data points is tracking ESG as it's become very important to lenders. So, you know, we have real-time information from the sensors on real-time lenders' assets. We can calculate in real-time and codify all the environmental metrics that anyone will care about. And what's important is this information now becomes a part of the loan itself. It's not a separate sustainability report that may only not be produced annually. It now becomes part of the living data room of the financial agreement. And every single transaction in the event series in this loan's history is credit. Credit brings history in the full loan lifecycle from a resignation to securitization. It's captured and stored on a distributed ledger and a shared view between borrower and lenders is mutability and what is transpiring. We're getting ready to come to market next year for our first rebound to help one of our lenders re-pass on their portfolios. It will be the first rebound where each lender will have a token, a key, onto our distributed ledger where they can track the priority of payments from all the environmental metrics in real-time. And I think this is very important as central bankers around the world continue to now think about requiring more transparent reporting for ESG metrics. This is something that attacks force for financial, climate financial exposures is pushing for. And we're also seeing in Europe that central bankers are starting to move rebonds as part of their asset purchase agreements. So I think that combination of reducing friction by advocating for lenders to provide more regular autonomous reporting and creating fuel to the system by actually purchasing the green bonds. I mean, the law of the business tells us you want to really become an agent of accelerating change. That's the way to do it. Use friction and add in. It's a pleasure to be here. And of course, our discussion. So I want to pick up on a couple of themes earlier today and in particular that our central bankers here mentioned. One of the things that came up earlier was the decisions that central bankers, regulators face in terms of their how to engage with innovative technologies, whether it's regulating quickly, regulating out of existence, taking a hands-off approach. And I wonder if Dr. Ndungu and Governor Inves, if you could think about and speak to the times at which you've been dealing with the disruptors in PESA maybe about a decade ago and now digital currency and how you thought about the decision, I think in the case of Kenya, to take a watchful eye, but sort of a hands-off approach as it's developed in the private sector. And then in the case of Sweden, as you said, you weren't the decision maker. So you've taken the watchful eye, some of the private sector apps and other things developed, the corona. So I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about how you came to the calibration of how to engage with these disruptions. I joined the central bank at a time when there was a wave of pyramid schemes. So it means that even the PESA itself was classified as a pyramid scheme. You can imagine that it was good to be prepared for even 10,000 arguing in a different way. But I think after recently presentation by some of the key people from the tech course and even the Ministry of Information and their communication, I came to the conclusion that actually this is something that can help my head. And I acquired the term that central banks should be an agent of my development. The bottom line is that how do you take care of risks? I think in the presentation we really asked this provider an even potential market you're calling them disruptors. They are disruptors. We wanted actually to make sure that our role was of public nature, the public sector to provide. It's actually to make sure that we mitigate any form of risks. And so we have created all forms of risks that we thought we should do. We should take care of it until we came to the conclusion that everything was covered. So any licensee was very much dependent on have we taken care of any margin risks or any form of permanent credit that we hit the mark. Once we were satisfied then we actually... I think that is the approach that I took. One very basic starting point was that for us was just looking at the graphs realizing that people won't use money anymore. And that's sort of scary when you run a central bank because then you say well you know maybe we're running out of money or somebody else is taking over our business. We don't know what do we do. So that's one starting point. But there is another very important starting point also and most people never think about that because most people never deal with the money you own. They just take it for granted. And that is the fact that banks don't trust each other. So banks have a very strong preference for clearing in risk-free central bank money. And that means that the payment system run by the central bank is the core of the whole thing. And that means that everybody is interested in talking to you about how you actually do these things because you cannot move money from one bank to another without having money passing their payment system on the central bank. Because in that environment let's assume the way the central bank that takes you in this country back in 1905 or something like that. And those who read up on history know that that did not work well at all. So everything ends up in the central bank sooner or later. And take our switched system which is transactions from one cell to another that we have in a country with a little bit more than 10 million we have more than 6 million users. We were part of that evolutionary process from day one. Because what the general public need not understand at all is that when you do a switched transaction from one cell to another, ultimately the money actually passes out payment system. Because the banks don't trust each other. So we have been part of that and we have supported that from day one. But at the same time of course we would like to see that this evolves in a safe and in a sound way so that people don't get cheated and that's why we need to keep an eye on it. You need to try to move fast enough so that the whole time you can move to other places. And I mean this holds on over the world because if we are talking PayPal if we are talking Apple Pay or whatever all these systems are called ultimately the money passes through the payment system run by the central bank. So those are only like what you showed about NPSR kind of what the end users see and know. But you can never get around the central bank in this process and ideally you should try to do it in a nimble way compared to just complaining and try to turn back on it. And just to follow up governing events I wonder if you could provide us all especially the audience here and the audience online as you're watching your pilot develop are there any early conclusions you can share or new questions that are that are popping up that you do not anticipate? You have lots of tech people come and talk to us and it's striking that they don't know a thing about money. They know the tech part and they know how you make money but that's different from moving money. So that's one striking feature of this conversation and other very striking feature of it is that same thing actually holds when you talk to people who are experts in monetary policy because that's something completely separated from monetary and very very few people have an education in monetary theory and sort of the inner workings of money and some of those issues are almost philosophical. And this is really the hard part to create teams of experts with different backgrounds and get them to talk to each other in such a way that you actually create something that works. And that's kind of where we are we are personally going through a kind of process and we have a number of tech companies bidding for the e-promot pilot and once that process is over we will produce an e-promot pilot but it will be produced will be done in such a way that it is scalable. So that's to the extent that ultimately parliament decides that if this is going to do we can do it at the national level. And exactly the same conversation more than 100 years ago because more than 100 years ago the banks issued their own physical bank notes and the central bank issued its physical money. 100 years ago the bankers argued that there was no need for central bank physical money and now they argue that there is no need for digital central bank money. So in that respect there is nothing new under the infrastructure construct these things and time will tell where it will go but it's pretty hard actually to deal with these issues because so much of this is equivalent to dealing with electricity you just assume that in this part of the world you have 110 volts coming out of the socket and you never think about how it happens and the same thing with money you just take it for granted and assume that there is a certain structure that is being used to do these things and then you all of a sudden realize that making that's not that's not the case it's actually real people who decide on these structures and you can change these structures over time but people find it incredibly hard to get their heads around that and I had a little conversation with a couple of them and they talked about an e-proma it would look like and that sort of catches it how hard it is Well Governor you touched on collaboration in how the tech people come in and they don't know anything about central banking or financial regulation I think the same as often sometimes you talk to regulators and it's hard for them to keep up with all the developments in the private market Abdel I wonder if you could talk a little bit about maybe just thinking about your experience beyond just Banyan but also back to your history in investment banking but now you've sort of seen this opportunity taking your cues from some of what's happening in the financial inclusion space in the ESG space and use that to find your business opportunity so there is a collaboration of sorts there and I wonder if you could just speak to that and tell us how you look to central banks and other authorities to inform your technology for a business opportunity I think the collaboration is going to keep coming in the end but I was trying to allude to the friction that exists in the market being a real barrier and that friction is really there because lenders are concerned about regulation and that there was no regulation and no central bank that they had the answer to thanks to just be doing whatever they wanted to and we've seen that story before and by regulation is good I think that we need to think about how we embrace the power of technology to reduce the burden of the regulation on the financial community and that's where I hope the central banks will continue or actually accelerate their efforts to engage with other companies really understand the power of the technology at Bonnie and we've been fortunate to get this far because we had a few lenders who were willing to really engage with us very early and allow us to experiment with what we were thinking in a broad way and I think on the regulatory side more of that engagement will make the lenders feel comfortable so coming back to this idea of sort of different different jurisdictions being at different places I wonder Dr. Ndungu and Governor Inves if you could tell us the conversations you've had or experience in terms of with your counterparts across the world and how others are thinking about central bank digital currency where some are really leaning in and experimenting with going cashless maybe being led there by their constituency while others have stuck to the need for cash and really resisted the idea of central bank digital currency Thank you very much jurisdiction you have to start you have to start from the home front and I didn't push on because one of the things I had big fight with the banks especially in Kenya that is the time also there was a success in terms of microfinance some banks have succeeded in terms of microfinance they argued that the small the MPSA is going to actually snatch their customers but I argued that you need to encourage this because essentially then you can get deposits and even you can earn 24-7 because essentially you can get everyone actually participating in the payment system throughout the night and I think I remember I was in the US Treasury making a presentation and the US the Secretary of the Treasury you can pay for a taxi in Nairobi using a mobile phone at midnight so it means you are drawing from your bank now that is the Kenyan case was the banks were very much opposed to this but in the end they realized that all of a sudden they actually don't need to even create a large number of branches they can use the agency network they can use virtual accounts so it's a question of investment let me go back when we started even talking about it I remember I had so many occasions that I had to talk to the IMF and the World Bank actually even to explain how it was working and that was a very difficult aspect because at one time it was being seen like it's a payment system with no regulations we didn't have a legal framework for payment system in Kenya then because it was still sitting in the parliament waiting and what we did was to invoke the trust law and then the trust account which later became the transactions platform was actually a cash in cash out technological platform which again was actually guided by the trust law and the trustees were the owners of the account this worried even other jurisdiction now of course in the end after three presentations that is every annual meeting I think the World Bank and the IMF agreed that it was working very well. What about the African regions and actually most of the governance in the region except for Tanzania everybody else thought that we are allowing telcos to deal with money and I think this is an idea even I've gone to Nigeria like several times invited by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to talk to the Central Bank and even the business community and the banks and then they believed that we don't want a telco-led moral Kenyan moral is a telco-led moral then I actually insisted that it wasn't the movement the whole idea of converting cash into electronic units of the same cash has never sunk very well across even most African countries even to date there are some countries that say oh it is working very well but I'm not so sure it is good so essentially that it is the same thing about the digital currency and I made a point about that area so essentially it is across jurisdiction we still have these doubts about how can you convert cash into electronic units of cash and still call it cash again goes back to what Governor Inves is actually talking about maybe it is a space we really need maybe to come back and try to redefine that but I think when most observers came to Kenyan that's why in Afia for financial inclusion the digital working group it has changed names by the time it started as a mobile phone financial services working group now it is the digital working group and because I was chairman that time I think I had to host most of the people from Asia, Latin America and even Africa took up to the central bank of Kenya and tried to understand what is really happening it is the whole concept across the jurisdiction that how do you have electronic units of money in your phone and then it is also in an account in the same way now of course that comes back to the cryptocurrencies and I remember there was a big item in the news last year a woman in Kenya was actually saying that she pays her bills in a hotel using the bitcoin and it was a good analysis and they missed only one point how do you make the payments but the whole idea and the generous went on even hunting for the governor luckily I wasn't there and then then they were asked then they were asked did you ask how the payments are made and essentially it's the if you have a wallet if you have a wallet bitcoin wallet then you can change units with the same wallet isn't it and then we say if you really want to make Kenya shareings or dollars out of that you still have to go to a POS at the point of service and that's when they said don't ask central bank to talk about or even to accept a currency that doesn't know the origin doesn't have rules of the game doesn't have a real framework that you can rely on and that is how we were escaping this debate so across jurisdiction everybody was like no the central bank should allow cryptocurrency and then the question was where is it coming from and I think this is the kind of issue that Stefan is raising that maybe it is the failure of central bank to allow some innovation but central bank has to go through the ground rules that are supposed to be required because at the end of the day if you lose your income there's no mercy for the central bank because they come back and say the central bank did not advise that's why I started by saying once you have the risk mitigation and we paraded a lot of risk mitigation and then we paraded the legal framework that is required and then we paraded the guidance that are supposed to be followed then you'll be sure that it will work nicely around those sites. In fact I've been looking at different literature and I realized that the description of M-Pesa is one of the most successful regulatory sandbox but when we were doing that in Kenya we didn't realize that's what we were doing but actually that is the case that is the outcome that is showing up. The first issue is the payments both sale and retail and ideally it should be nowadays or if you've got a few years down the road 24-7 and if it's a real time settlement then you don't need to close collateral because you don't close the system at night and that reduces the need for collateral in the system and eventually also those in the banking community think through this and come to the same conclusion that it's probably better to do everything real time because then you don't have to close collateral that's a good point. The other part of it is a central bank digital cuts and that in some sense is a bit of a different issue because here we already and we have had for years and years wholesale central bank digital cuts because banks deposit money with the central bank. So there they are underlying issue is to what extent a retail central bank digital currency is a compliment to what you already have and here it differs enormously from country to country depending on what kind of a monetary system you have and to what extent the country question is underbank or overbank whether you trust private institutions or whether you don't trust private institutions at all so that's an issue there and then finally cash as a backup is not going to go away because if the lights go off you can't do the thing and then that means that it's my responsibility and it's nobody else's business to understand how I do it to make sure that we can distribute cash all over the country if there is a problem and the private sector will never ever do that sort of voluntarily so that needs to be there now to your point about the conversations you have had about where it's my money because that's essentially I mean we are constructing up in our heads to think about things in a very tangible and that's what we think about notes, coins, gold and then all of a sudden everything becomes digital and then people ask themselves where is my money and what does it look like the good answer is not to say it's in the cloud people say in whose cloud where do I find the cloud and that's where it gets really, really difficult to deal with these issues and that's where you get into the whole issue of trust and who is actually backing up the system is it the government or is it somebody else and this of course varies enormously from jurisdiction to jurisdiction on the first basis you are better off if we take Zimbabwe or Venezuela to actually use somebody else's cloud or somebody else's money and where you have trust to do but in addition to that it doesn't really matter if you are talking about cell phones computers, iPads, cards what not that's kind of irrelevant the key is actually to make sure that you can use different technical ways of storing your money and making your payments that is really important but when you do that then you also get into the issue that was alluded to this morning the cost of doing this thing and let me give you one example I'm not good at the numbers but I think that's sort of they are both hard numbers but they are not completely hard my personal view is that parts of Europe is seriously overriding that has to change that has been seriously resisted for decades now in those parts of Europe where you are overbanked you tend to have a cost-to-income ratio around 80-90% Nordic banks tend to have a cost-to-income ratio around 45-55% if you set up a a new bank today with a banking license which is basically just an internet bank maybe you get to a cost-to-income ratio about 20-25% and then we heard earlier this morning about the marginal cost of one more transaction if you use modern systems now that is going to be disrupted there is no question about that and either you go with the flow and you are capable and willing and able to scrap your own main frames or you just fight it with the hope that you will survive and that is an underlying issue and let me give you an example from my world we started talking to our banks I am talking about the major banks in the country about a year ago and we said guys we are heading into an environment and a world where payment systems can be run technically 24-7 so what about extending our opening hours and I had in mind we extended our opening hours our payment system our wholesale system opens at 7 and it closes at 5 a few of them came back and said there is no need to extend their opening hours and then this month we will actually extend the opening hours from 5 to 60 that is not the future that is not the future eventually somebody else is going to show up that is the pace at which we change things and say hey we can run this 24-7 but those are sort of some of the issues that we will have to take part of because we have all in our backfacts a certain structure of the financial sector and that structure will have to change and still when that change takes place we need to maintain trust in the system I think we have got about 15 minutes left so I would love to open it up to audience Q&A and please make sure you introduce yourself wait for the mic and then introduce yourself as you are asking your question I think David has a Hi my name is David Eric and I am a co-founder of a fintech called Petal and also a co-founder of a non-profit with John Barefoot called the AIR sign-based innovative regulation I want to thank Adrian and Michael for pulling this together this has been just a phenomenally thought provoking and interesting conference I also want to thank our three distinguished guests because this has really been a very very interesting session I have a question actually it is for Governor Ingves with regards to the transition to an e-currency one of the primary Values of cash is privacy, privacy of transactions. And as we all know, and perhaps foreshadowing our next session, it's also one of the great pitfalls of cash is the access to money laundering and the heinous crimes that that can enable. As you start thinking about transitioning to an e-currency, how important is the question of privacy? Is that a question that is a part of what a central bank should be concerned about? And if so, what frameworks have you been thinking about? It works or not, and what kind of history you have. But the key to this is really, if you start thinking about it, it's very, I think about it in terms of the pilot that we're doing now, if you create something digital which is fairly cashed live, then it's a must to apply the same AML rules that we use for cash. And the world has changed enormously on that side because you cannot anymore buy things with a suitable cash. I mean, that just would not work. So in that sense, the world has really changed. And the real underlying issue is what the preference you have is it better than having government knowing about what you're doing, or some private company knowing about what you're doing. And in both cases, what are the safeguards when it comes to the business? So our bottom line is basically to say that the rules have to be the same, whether it really matter whether it's digital or whether it's physical. And the world has really, really changed when it comes to how we deal with money or other issues differently. Thank you. Catherine Dominguez at the University of Michigan. So all the central banks I know of have a national mandate, which I think you mentioned as well. And they're not global. They're really focused on what is best for the domestic economy. But all that we've been talking about is this kind of idea of trust and potentially cross-settlement of payments. And I'm just curious, since we're talking about the central bank of the future, how would we actually move from this very nationally focused set of institutions? Or would the central bank of the future in your minds actually be an international central bank or are we going to stick with the current country by country model and have coordination across them? I'm just curious about where you think that's going. There is no support for a global central bank present. No zero political central bank. So the only way to do it is to have central banks that cooperate in one way or the other. I mean, this issue is constantly under the surface and we have the IFS and we have the SDR. And technically, you could sort of let that evolve over time, but in the near future, just think about it. I think different jurisdictions can answer that question differently, because I think from where I come from, especially the African region, central banks are really good agents of market development. And once the market has developed, then they move on to their commodity. Because essentially, the commodities are always well defined. One of them is monetary policy, financial stability, and of course, support government, now we have national payments, then support government's national development agenda. The next, the question is, what is government's national development agenda? One of them is actually supporting the market. But once you've done that, then you move on to the next. Perhaps you let the market flow. And that is going to be, maybe the central bank of the future is actually to look at, how do you nudge the market to the right direction? And then, when do you exit that market? When do you exit that the market has actually, should I say, produced the right environment and is actually evolving on its own? That is, you're out for the endogenous development. And that is from the region that I come from, if the central bank doesn't provide that kind of shepherding and nudging the market in the right direction, then obviously it will be failing in terms of the national development agenda. But it doesn't have to be there after the market has evolved. Maybe that's the way I would look at it. And of course, everybody talks about regional integration and we meet. I think the best we have done in the East African region is to adapt the same kind of monetary policy framework. And I will talk about it. So one of them was the encouragement from Stefan. Those years, when everybody was moving into inflation targeting. But beyond that, how they use different instruments depends very much on the market development, on their own market development and how the central bank have pushed the market development in that kind of sphere. Can I add to that though, that one thing that is happening also in a world where you have many central banks and this holds particularly for smaller countries, is a world where it becomes less and less likely that you develop your own systems. Because it's just cost too much to do that. And when we're talking about digitalization, when we're talking about, let me give you an example. When I was a young man in the options business and I dealt with stock exchanges and things like that, everything was made put together domestically in one form or the other. Today you can buy a stock exchange off shelf. In the future, it's highly likely that you can also buy a digital currency off shelf. Because it's not that hard actually to produce these things. And in that environment, it's one thing to be responsible for things, but it's a different thing in terms of where actually the servers are located and how you operate the systems and take our present payment system, which is getting the wholesale system. It was actually from the beginning developed in South Africa, it's owned by an Italian company. And I think that a good chunk of the rewriting of the code is probably done in India or I don't know where it's done. But it's actually, that's how these things have all nowadays and that's globalization because it's unrealistic for us to hire 200 IT people and do all this on our own because it's much more efficient to have somebody else doing it. But it takes quite a while to get to that point because once people say, well, are you buying this from somebody else? They get kind of a bit suspicious. And this is really where it pays to cooperate. Hi, Matt Corley, former commercial banker and now an MBA student at the University of Michigan. It's clear that the pushback on Facebook's Libra is that we need a much closer partnership between the public and private sector. I'd be curious to get all of your opinions on kind of what is the best way to collaborate towards a global currency of the future? If I knew that, I probably wouldn't be here. So a second best is to ensure that we have transaction systems that are efficient and that can handle these things because most likely we will still continue to have national currencies, but maybe we will have fewer national currencies in the future than what we have had in the past. And how that will evolve, I just don't know because there has been so many attempts and so many political conversations of over the years, let's say in the context of the IMF to think about a global currency, but as long as nation states produce laws, then that's just the way things will stay. Good afternoon, Chris Globbier from the Gates Foundation. In the 20th century, central banks, regulators and organizations like the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision wrote standards and rules. These are words written down that tell people how we expect banks and other types institutions to behave and what they should and shouldn't do. But today and yesterday, we've been talking about artificial intelligence and we've been talking about automation and 24 by seven availability and intelligent agents and Abdel is writing code to help monitor smart contacts and so on and loan agreements. So might the central bank of the future or the Basel Committee of the future stop writing rules and instead write code or maybe mandate the use of certain technologies and Abdel, would you be happy in a world like that? So for our two governors, maybe first on what might change about rule writing in the future? I would be happy in a world like that. I think it would make for a much better world. But in my opinion, I think you typically see the innovation that seldom comes from within. There's a reason why code act and invent Instagram. Usually you need a fresh perspective and so I'm of the view that collaborating with third parties to properly innovate is probably the best path forward. But the end game ends up being the same. More of a digital regulatory environment, I think would allow the whole system to function more efficiently. I think that you just have to keep at it for years and years and years. And there was a story the other day in the newspapers about some kind of a postal agreement and an organization which is more than 100 years old dealing with how much you pay when you send packages cross-border and then this is just how these things evolve over time. And I mean here when it comes to code or no code, I mean I mentioned the whole issue of a digital definition of who you are. For that to be meaningful cross-border you have to agree on what the nature of that kind of a definition would be and that would require some serious conversations about how you actually do that. Same thing when it comes to the SWIFT system which is basically a global system dealing with not making payments but dealing with payment messages. And you need a global standard to deal with that because otherwise you would have no idea what kind of messages go with the payments. And that's one example where it has been possible to get to an agreement on how this is done. But it is never easy because I mean being chairman of the Basel committee, you sit there, the chairperson and then you have 50 people around the table and all of them say that they are right. And then you have to try to make sense of that and just live with the fact that there are many rights using the plural. Maybe we do one more. Yeah, Michael began from the Gates Foundation. So you've said the existing cross-border payment system is outdated, it doesn't work well. We don't think we're gonna move to a global central bank and a global single currency. The TIP system is owned and run by a single entity. If you think about other regional efforts and I know that Governor Ndugu and former Governor Ndulu in Tanzania were starting to think about East Africa regionalization. Does this require a, ultimately do we need a global entity that runs a global payment system? Can this be done just through cooperation? And you've talked about SWIFT sort of place some of that role currently, but like Abdel says, innovation rarely comes from within a monopolistic company. What's the way forward? How do we think about this and do we need new entities that can help drive a whole new cross-border payment system? I don't, I think it would be just too difficult because each and every time we start thinking about something global, creating a better world, nothing moves because it's just too hard because it sort of say, let's create a Cadillac or a Rolls Royce. It never gets done. And all those who have been involved in major IT projects know that. So if you aim for a Fiat 127 on a sort of a regional basis, that's one way to start. And maybe this is not a very good comparison, but it has something to do with your question. The first cross-border mobile phone system ever constructed was the NMT, the Nordic Mobile Phone Standard, sort of G1. And the rest is history because it was possible to agree on a standard between a limited group of countries and then others sort of realized maybe there is something in this. So if you can sort of gradually prove your case, you can take it from there. And that's certainly the case in various parts of Africa. And if you agree on it without talking forever, you just get on with it and do it, then it will happen. And eventually it will be copied by others or others can sort of voluntarily join because each and every time you try to create something where you impose things on others, it just won't happen. Or at least that's my view. And I think what Michael is you're mentioning is that we try to do that in East Africa. We created the East African Payment System. And then the first step was actually to link up the ROT GSS. Those countries that didn't have very adequate ROT, real-time growth settlement, they managed to get funds from the African Development Bank and the World Bank and they were able to mount that. The next thing was actually when it came now to cross-border payments, which required that you can actually use the local currencies. So what hit us very badly was actually the, first of all, is the national payment system in each country. We were not very well-arrived. But the most inhibiting was actually the bilateral exchange rates. And in a sense, nobody wants one currency to dominate. And I argued that we can develop a numerator, but nobody thought about it. So we decided Kenya and Tanzania can go about it and then we'll be posting the bilateral exchange that we find account. Corporates were funding the accounts in the currencies that it meant bringing in physical currency. Of course, we realized that it can't go for long. Physical currency, you take your physical currency, Kenyan sharing to Tanzania in Russia, which was nearest. And then you bring some to Nairobi. Obviously, nobody was taking the Tanzanian shares. So essentially, it wouldn't go far. So we went far and said, if we have a national, a numerator for the African economies, then it can work and we can push it to that level. But again, it all depends who is the first, who is the reader, who is the reader in this. I think after Kikweta and the Kibaki left the scene, everything died slowly. Nobody even talks about it. It is a national readership problem because once the readers agree, central banks will be very, very effective in moving to the next level. I wanna thank our panelists for a very interesting conversation. Thank you so much.