 Welcome to the Fiji Symposium 2019 here in Cairo in Egypt where I'm very pleased to be joined in the studio this morning by Mr Akiles Almanzi who is lead financial sector specialist for the World Bank Group. Mr Almanzi, welcome to the studio. Good morning. Thank you for coming with me. Good morning. Now I'd like to, we've just caught you just before you're going into a session here at the symposium on cyber security simulation. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about that and of course about the work that you've been doing over the last few years. OK, over the last 10 years with the global financial crisis, we at the World Bank started doing crisis simulation exercises for financial sector authorities, governors of central banks, heads of bank supervision, ministers of finance and other authorities, depending on the institutional structure of the country. And at the start, 10 years ago, we were using the stories that explained, popularly at least, the financial crisis, insolvency and loan portfolios, etc. But because of my own biases, I guess, I started using cyber incidents as excuse to generate problems in the financial sector that would require the traditional decisions of the financial sector authorities, meaning providing liquid assistance, supervisory measures, even dealing with insolvency, the resolution of failed bank. But in the process of doing that, we discovered that many people are age, still think that cyber security is a technical issue for the IT guys working at the IT department. It's not my problem. And what we decided to do is to use exactly the same approach to crisis simulations, but to have these guys dealing with the incidents themselves. A cyber incident requires, quite frequently, business continuity decisions that cannot be delegated in the technical people, if you, for example, have malware affecting a critically important infrastructure. What do you do? You turn it off. OK, but you have a crisis immediately afterwards. You don't turn it off. You are taking the risk that the thing may end up producing a catastrophe. That kind of decision cannot obviously be delegated. So we've been doing this. We've done this so far with countries which are pretty sophisticated on the technical side. The institutional side is the challenge. And precisely because of that, some of these countries have requested assistance on, well, how to regulate the financial system, how to allocate responsibilities, who is in charge of what. And so, first of all, we put together a digest of the literature that's emerged on regulations, laws in some cases, for example, in the case of the European Union, and then guidance issued by multilateral organisms like CPMI, the Basel community, et cetera. And some countries have asked us to compare their own regulations with the outstanding literature in the world to see if we can identify gaps, things that they have not yet addressed, or, alternatively, things that they are addressing, but they are addressing in a radically different way and they may want to reconsider, let's say. So it's a very interesting combination. You start trying to convince people that they have a problem, and once you convince them, then ask for help, and we can also help on the regulatory side. When I say we, I mean the small group where I work. At the World Bank, we do have additional resources. For example, our information security people have developed an assessment tool, which is very useful, for example, for a central bank or a financial infrastructure to assess its own preparedness. Then dealing with cyber incidents quite frequently becomes a national security issue. If you have an incident threatening the collapse of a major bank or the entire financial system, given the contagion that is possible with cyber, at some point the financial sector authorities, which in many countries believe that they are the owners of the thing, will get the knock at the door, open the door, there's a guy with a green uniform behind saying, get out, this is my problem, because national security is at stake. There is another group of people at the World Bank working with ITU, by the way, assisting countries in the development of national cybersecurity strategies, basically allocating responsibilities on the regulation, supervision and incident response, which are the different stages of the problem. So we do have quite a few resources to assist countries in need of help with this. You mentioned regulation. I wanted to ask you, what innovations do you think are required in regulatory collaboration to create an enabling environment for digital financial services? Well, I have a biased answer to that question. I guess if you ask somebody else if you want to come up with something different, I do believe that what we've been doing really matters. And what we've been doing with our crisis simulations is providing opportunities for financial sector authorities to practice doing what they will have to do in real life. There are many professions who have understood from day zero that they need to practice. Obvious example, the military, but not just the military, the firefighters, doctors, sergeants, for example, lots of professions fully understand that they cannot start learning surgery the day they open your belly. Let's say they need to practice. For some reason, politicians and people close to politicians like in general financial sector authorities don't necessarily share that view. And we are trying to convince them that it is necessary to practice decision making. And that's exactly what we are going to be doing in a few minutes here. But obviously, from the World Bank, we cannot come back to a country each one of the many countries we work with every six months to do an exercise. So there is a capacity building side of what we do. We normally prepare and run these exercises with help of a local team so that the local team learns our tricks and then they can keep doing this on a regular basis. Provided that the authorities, we convince the authorities that they need to do so, and that's quite a challenge. But that is the whole point. Practicing decision making in difficult situations is not an exam that you can pass or fail. It is just an opportunity to see if you can understand what's going on and take a decision. One, reality is a very complicated thing, of course. And any game is an abstraction of reality. And our games focus on one particular dimension of reality, which is the fact that the pieces of information, the pieces of the puzzle, let's say, are distributed among many different parties. So in order for the decision makers to figure out what's going on, there is an information-sharing process that has to take place. And there are many reasons why information-sharing doesn't work perfectly all over the world, let's say, including problems of incentives. There are certain things I prefer not to know. There are certain things I don't want you to know. And then, well, maybe I'm not competent enough to explain you in a clear, precise way at the right time what's going on. And that is going to bias your understanding of what's going on. And that may lead to take completely crazy decisions. Now, you better learn those things with our crazy exercises instead of learning it the hard way in reality. Well, you're being very modest here, obviously. But in terms of those exercises, they sound certainly vital and very, very important for people to take notice of. I wanted to thank you for your company here at the Fiji Symposium. I also just wanted to check with you finally ask you why this particular symposium, why did you invest the time and effort to come to the Fiji Symposium? Well, I was invited by my colleagues at the World Bank who have been involved for a long while now with Fiji. And from my perspective, when I hear financial inclusion and I hear the optimists, that there are everywhere in the world, and particularly under my roof at the World Bank, there are many optimists who think that technology, digital technology, is magical and going to solve all problems. I believe that if we do not try to secure the infrastructure, if we don't teach people to interact safely with digital devices, sooner or later, you are going to have a disaster. And once you have a disaster, you are going to have the kind of picture that you can see in my country. I'm from Argentina. It's a country that has had a financial crisis as nearly since inception a little longer than 200 years ago. We are experts in producing financial crisis. But we are not alone in Latin America. There are other countries, for example, Mexico is another country that has had terrible financial crisis. Once you have a financial crisis, for whatever reason, because the price of oil goes down, or in the case of Argentina, the price of soybeans goes down, or there is a disaster with financial systems so people cannot access their money at the banks, et cetera. You know what? They don't want to go back to the banks. And you end up with a tiny financial sector that cannot support the functioning of the economy, much less economic development. So if you want to promote the use of digital technology to increase access to financial services, you better make sure that that access minimizes the risk of a disaster. Because the day there is a disaster, then it may take generations for you to convince people to go back to the system. And you know what? When I was a kid many years ago now, of course, I had to go and stand in line two, three hours to pay the phone bill, the water bill, et cetera, at the bank. Not anymore. If people lose their trust in the technology we have today, you have to go back to those days. But there is a problem. The guys behind the counter 50 years ago are dead or retired. We cannot go back to manual overnight. So the magnitude of a disaster derived from a collapsing systems of any kind is terrible. So you do have to do whatever you can to help people understand the rules. And that includes the person who is handling her, his account with a smartphone. And that is also the governor of the central bank, the head of bank supervision, the minister of finance, many other important people who will have to take critical decisions. And if the decisions are wrong, then not only they, everybody will face the consequences. Thank you very much indeed. A pleasure. Thank you very much.