 Good evening and welcome. We're coming to you from day two of the Fiji Symposium in Bangalore, the platform for all talks on financial inclusion. And right now with me is the Executive Director of Global Alliance for Legal Aid, Jimmy Solly. Welcome, Jimmy. Thank you. Thank you for being part of Fiji Symposium. Thank you. It's my pleasure. And how does it feel? This is the first ever Fiji Symposium we're doing in India. Well, I don't know. For me, it doesn't feel like the first ever. It feels like continuation of previous work because I was engaged in the ITU's work on digital financial services, the previous focus group. So we had the consumer experience and protection working group. And now I've shifted to looking at trust and some very specific issues in trust. So could you tell us a little more about the potential of digital financial services to actually increase financial inclusion? I am a consumer protection lawyer by training and practice and I feel like there is a vast potential that's untapped, perhaps limited only by our imagination. However, I feel like we are sometimes forgetting the legacy problems of the financial services sector. And it is very important that now we very much drill down and concentrate on protecting the consumer. So things like data privacy and protection are very paramount in my concerns. The predatory financial practices have always been with us. If we now talk about adding digital credit products, we have some countries that have very debt saturated populations. So some of these are my concerns that have never left me. And I feel like the financial inclusion industry is very excited and very enthusiastic about new products and access. But when you start to talk about addressing the old problems or financial literacy, education, protection of consumers, those are always kind of less exciting to talk about the problems versus talking about the shiny new potential. So I feel like we need to find more of a balance. So coming to the problems, what do you think is the few factors that might be helpful for people to actually embrace digital financial services and use it over the traditional methods of banking and cash, for example? Well, trust is key. And I think we see from some of the past research done from organizations like CGAAP, people are concerned about losing their money. And once they lose it, they're not going to use that system again, probably. And that probably must have happened to quite a few people and that's why we're finding it difficult to move over. Right. And then you look at the other related consumer protection issues. If people lose their money, where do they go for redress? One of the topics that we're looking very closely at that I feel has not received a lot of attention is this issue of digital Ponzi schemes and digital masks, digital frauds. We're calling them unlicensed digital investment schemes. But that's very difficult to say it's a mouthful. So we call them digital Ponzi or digital pyramid schemes. And with the advent of the internet, social networks, messaging services, we're seeing that there's an exponential growth in these types of frauds. But we're not seeing the exponential growth in regulatory concentration or attention to the problem. So this is very problematic also because there is a scope of potential loss that is enormous. There was some research done in Nigeria on just one of these digital Ponzi schemes, the MMM scheme. 77 million US dollars was transacted. And not even in the entire financial sector was transacted through the settlement banks. So there was also some intra bank transactions that were not covered. They estimate another 30% that that scheme could have been enlarged. The problem is that that's just one scheme. At a single moment in time, I think the Nibs Settlements Bank looked at this issue and they counted 91 schemes ongoing. The one scheme was also equivalent to 61% greater than the Ministry of Education's budget. So this shows just one one little scheme in one country. Now because of the ability to act on the internet on social networks, you have schemes that can operate in many countries at the same time. You don't have to sell door to door. You don't have to be a Bernie Madoff. You don't have to have that charisma anymore. You can just have your trolls operating online. But who's watching the internet? Exactly. So what are we doing to address these unlicensed digital investment schemes? Not enough. Obviously not enough. There's not even a lot of data aggregated by the regulators on the scope with the problem. It's very difficult to find. There's not enough outreach and education programs to consumers. Usually what happens is the consumer, if they know how to access the central bank's website, they might find a warning saying watch out this scheme is operational. But that's not sufficient and it's not continuous. And the fraudsters know how to access people. They use preachers sometimes. They use football players. They use famous celebrities. So we need to be aware of how they're selling and promoting these schemes and be in that same place with countervailing messaging. Okay. So there's quite a bit in terms of security to be looked forward to, right? Yeah. If you're looking at it from a positive perspective, there's a lot to be done. If you're looking at it from the negative perspective, there's a lot of financial exclusion going on under our noses that is not being addressed. Okay. And that's what we're hoping we'll address in the future. Thank you so much for being part of this. Thank you very much.