 It's my pleasure to welcome to the studio today Reinhard Scholl. He's the Deputy Director of ITU's Telecommunications Standardization Bureau. And he's also one of the leaders of a workshop on digital financial services for financial inclusion. Reinhard, thank you very much. Could you tell me a little bit about ITU's role in this workshop on digital financial services for financial inclusion? Yeah, thanks, Sarah. The modern financial system is not working for the poor, in particular not for the unbanked, for the people without a bank account. But there is an alternative, and it's called digital financial services, and in particular, as it was pioneered by an operator in Kenya some 70 years ago, a service whereby people without a bank account can send money to whoever they would like to send money to. And this is where ITU comes into play. ITU is a whosofu of companies and countries and regulators, or academia, that are involved in the ICT, in the ICT industry. So ITU has a large knowledge base in ICT. ITU also has a great convening power. It can pull together different stakeholders, as we've seen numerous times in the past. We had organized this workshop on digital financial services and financial inclusion, and we have indeed been able to pull together a great number of speakers from both the banking industry and also from the ICT industry. So very much happy about this, this was a workshop with a lot of energy. And it was actually the sort of prelude to a focus group that the ITU is going to start now today. Today is the first meeting in order to move this work forward. The lifetime of this focus group is 24 months, and right now the discussions are taking place on how to structure the work. So what are the main challenges that will enable us to rapidly and effectively leverage ICTs in promoting digital financial services? There are different challenges. A lot of countries are trying to duplicate the success of Kenya. Some countries are very successful, in other countries the take up is somewhat slow. So it's not quite clear why are some things working in some countries, why are some things not working in other countries. There are various issues. One is the regulatory environment, should you have a lean regulatory environment, and then let the market experiment a bit and then strengthen the rules, or should you come with a solid regulatory touch from the very beginning? What are the business models? We have two industries, the banking industry and the telco industry, who offers, who does what kind of service. There are also technical challenges. For example, suppose you are subscribed to an operator in your country, but you would like to send money to someone who is subscribed to another operator. So how do you ensure interability, or going even a step further, suppose you have someone working in a country, outside your country, and the person would like to send money to his or her family, is that possible using mobile devices? So these are also some of the technological questions. How do you think ITU can specifically contribute to the work of this kind of focus group? What kind of expertise can ITU offer? ITU has a great tool in place, which we call a focus group, and what characterizes a focus group is that it is open to anyone. You do not have to be a member of the ITU. So that's what we saw in today's focus group meeting, that perhaps like 80% of the participants were actually from companies that were not members of the ITU. So that's fantastic. So this convening power of the ITU, I think, is a great advantage. And in addition, of course, whenever ICT is involved, you would like to benefit from the knowledge of the experts active in the ICT industry. So of course, ITU has a large, big, big expertise in this topic, which can then contribute in solving the various challenges for digital financial services. One last question, perhaps the two communities, financial services and telecoms, they're both highly regulated sectors. How easy will it be to get those two sectors to talk together and understand one another? It is a challenge. It is a challenge in general. When you have different industry sectors converging, and if they have to talk to each other, we see this not only in the sector of digital financial services, where the banking and the telecom industry are part of the game. We also see this, for example, with the car industry. The car today is a computer, there's a lot of ICT in there. So here, two industries are converging. You see it in the utility industry, where the, for example, with respect to smart grids, where you have the ICT industry and the utilities, the electricity industry that are on the same table. So it's already difficult enough, sometimes, to get agreement, to get a consensus within the ICT industry for standards and for agreement on best practices. It does add a level of complexity, if you have another industry sector, but I think that's just the way it is, and it's a challenge. And I think looking forward to contributing to solving this challenge. Underlines maybe the value of, indeed, this kind of event that helps kick off some dialogue. Yes, indeed. Thank you very much indeed for talking to us, Reinhard. Thank you, Sarah.