 Welcome to the Fiji Symposium 2019, here in Cairo, Egypt, where I'm very pleased to be joining the studio today, Mr Bilal Jamoussi, who's the Chief of Study Groups for the Standardization Bureau of the International Telecommunication Union. Bilal, welcome to the studio. Thank you very much for having me. I'd like to talk to you about this event, the Financial Inclusion Global Initiative. This symposium is obviously a very key subject, a very important subject for the world. Why is it important to ITU? The Financial Inclusion is important to ITU because our ministers and regulators at the latest Plenipotentiary Conference decided, had a resolution on the importance of financial inclusion. So they resolved that the ITU should work on enabling financial services to the poor using information and communication technologies. And we have been embarked in this journey over the past few years in the form of focus groups and this partnership with the World Bank and CPMI of the Bank of International Settlements with funding from the Gates Foundation to take some of the output of the focus group and the PAFI principles to help in shaping a regulatory environment that brings both the banking system or the financial sector and the telecom sector together. This intersection of sectors, financial and ICT is common in other sectors. We have intersection of transportation and ICT, health sector and ICT. And in all of these intersection of areas, there is an important element of bringing the conversation between the regulators of both sectors to have a new enabling environment and in this case an enabling environment for financial inclusion and financial services. The fact that there are 1.7 billion people, adults today, that do not have any access to financial services and the same people or 1.2 billion have a mobile phone brings a huge opportunity to provide that financial inclusion through those mobile devices. They could be feature simple phones or they could be more advanced smartphones. And this is what our partnership is doing and working on using those mobile devices and ICT devices to bring more and more reach of financial inclusion and financial services to poor people. So what are the main expectations for this symposium? So this symposium is our second symposium and we have had about a year and a half of in-country implementation. Fiji is about 3x3x3 so we have 3 partners, ITU, the World Bank and CPMI. We have 3 implementation countries, Egypt, Mexico and China. And we have 3 working groups, working group on electronic payment acceptance, a working group on digital identifiers or digital ID and a working group on security infrastructure and trust that's led by the ITU. And in the course of our implementation we've had a lot of learning of country-specific needs as well as the working groups have developed solutions in terms of securing the transactions, providing quality of service of the transaction that we will be sharing in the symposium. And the idea is to really continue the momentum, share the knowledge, provide policy makers, ministers, telecom regulators, central bank governors with the tools that they can use from this experience to enable financial inclusion in their countries. And I see there's also a hackathon here as well. Right. We're very fortunate to have a vibrant young population that is focused on developing new solutions and applications with ICT. Today we have 14 teams competing in the room next door. They were actually selected out of 350 applicants and they will be using a set of APIs, protocol interfaces, to provide financial services to the poor for very low amounts of transactions at very low cost. And the idea is to make it simple so that the average man or woman on the street buying fruit from a merchant can do that transaction instead of cash using their mobile phone. And we just kicked off the hackathon. They have 24 hours to work on it. And they have seven APIs application interfaces that are available in Egypt. And they will have to choose two of them, at least, and then program to those interfaces and then pitch their solutions tomorrow. Now coming back to the symposium, I presume that the discussions and the conversations that happen here, of course, are extremely important. But in terms of outcomes, what do you hope would be the outcome from this symposium? Well, the outcome ideally would be a set of tools and set of recommendations that policy makers can go with and be able to impact change in their governments and in their countries, as well as the technologists to have a view of what are the key technologies that they can further develop and implement. Also a higher level of trust in these financial transactions. The key element for people to move from cash to financial services, one is the access and having the tools to do it. But an important factor is psychological, whether I trust this device to send my money or receive money. And the more we show how the technology is secure and that the user is adequately identified and authenticated and that the transactions are safe and can complete with adequate quality of service. The more people will trust in the solution and will use it. Well we hope to catch up with you again in the future, but thank you very much for joining us in the studio today and very best with the symposium, thank you.