 It's my great pleasure to be in the studio today with Thomas Lammer. He's the senior payment specialist with the World Bank and he's here at ITU to participate in a special workshop on digital financial services. Thomas, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Can you tell me what does the World Bank hope to achieve as part of this new focus group that ITU is going to be setting up around digital financial services? I think one of the key aspects of this focus group would be how to leverage digital financial services for financial inclusion. The World Bank's president, Dr. Jim Kim, has set out the target last year that by 2020 there should be universal financial access. What do we mean with universal financial access? It's to give transaction accounts to all adults worldwide because currently, depending on different studies, about half of the world's adult population still doesn't have access to a bank account with a regulated financial institution. In order to achieve this very ambitious objective to have universal financial access or transaction accounts to all by 2020 as an objective which can also be realized, we think that there are specific foundations necessary. Some of these foundations are, of course, a strong political commitment to bring this objective into reality. Another one would be to have a conducive or, let's say, proportionate and neutral legal and regulatory environment. And the last one, and I think this is a specific issue which we would like to look at also in the context of this working group, is how to leverage and payment infrastructure and the information and communication that can also infrastructure to achieve these objectives. It sounds like World Bank's got quite a lot of experience already working in digital financial services, quite an interesting emerging area. What sort of activities have you already been involved in? So the World Bank as such and the payment systems development group of the World Bank in specific has been involved in more than 120 countries over the past 20 years in kind of implementing payment systems reforms, helping to establish retail payment strategies or national payment strategies as such and to work together with the specific countries to improve the efficiency of the payment systems as such. So we think that we have quite a lot of experience in payment services and we have also been very much involved in defining also general principles and the general principles for remittances would be one of these examples to really bring forward the payment systems agenda. So these are aspects which are at our heart and where we try to really improve the national payment systems as such and to also look at it from a global perspective how to improve payment services. Getting the regulatory framework right is going to be very important I think in establishing this as a new market. How can the World Bank contribute to ITU's standard setting work for regulators and for the private sector? So the World Bank and the payment systems development group has very good experience with standard setting bodies. So we have been cooperating for a long period with the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructure formally known as the Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems and one of these outputs of very successful outputs as we think were the general principles for remittances which were published in 2007 and consequently they have been adopted by G8 and G20 who set the target to reduce remittance prices by five percentage points within five years so the so-called five by five objective and as a consequence the World Bank has established a global remittance price database and based on our monitoring in the meantime 42.5 billion US dollars have been saved in remittance prices. So here we can see that if we kind of establish together with standard setting bodies in the feet of remittances it was the Committee on Payment and Market Infrastructures. If we establish general principles if these principles are then adopted by governments and endorsed also by market participants that this can really contribute and increase the benefit and efficiency for the individual customer. So one aspect I would also like to highlight in this regard is the Payment Aspects for Financial Inclusion Working Group Task Force we have also recently established together with the CPMI and within this task force we are looking specifically on the Payment Aspects of Financial Inclusion. So I think here we also see that there might be a lot of work which is already going on and we think that's the unique benefit of the ITU Focus Group is indeed that it brings together the private sector and the public sector it brings together the financial sector as well as the telecommunications sector and really it brings together also developing and developed countries and that we think based on this kind of unique setting we will also be able to look at these kind of new hybrid developments in the field of payment services which are of very importance to achieve the target to have transaction accounts for all in order to allow people to safely and efficiently send and receive payments and also to store safely money. Thank you I think DiTU will benefit very much from collaborating with World Bank and with the private sector across this and I very much thank you for being with us today. Thank you for having me.