 Welcome to the Fiji Symposium 2019 here in Cairo, Egypt. We're very pleased to be joining the studio today by Barbara Iyai, who is the Chief Growth Officer, Managing Director of Africa for ELEMENT. Welcome to the studio. Thank you. Now, Barbara, perhaps you could tell us a little bit about ELEMENT and also what brings you here to this symposium. Sure. ELEMENT is an AI company that deploys mobile biometric software. So we deploy this software to help our partners all over the world identify customers in different sectors, banking, telecom, healthcare. We work with governments. I'm here because I want to talk about digital financial services and how our software is helping to revolutionize that right now. Now, an unintended consequence of a digital finance-led financial inclusion program is that it can lead to greater financial data inclusion, but not necessarily increase financial inclusion. I wanted to ask you if you agree with this statement. Absolutely. I think there's a difference between helping people actually obtain financial services and having a lot of data about people and not using a way that gives people financial services. I think one of the important things to lift people out of poverty is to create products and services that make sense for them. Digital identity, which is really what the core of ELEMENT is about, is really to help partners, banks, anybody providing financial services to understand who that customer is and be able to provide products and services that make sense for them. That is truly financial inclusion in terms of giving people the opportunity to not just get affordable financial services but get good quality financial services in an efficient way that makes sense for them. So what's the current landscape at the moment for digital identity? Digital identity takes a whole variety of spectrums. You can think about digital identity in terms of the digital track record of an individual. What ELEMENT focuses on is biometrics. We use machine learning techniques to create the digital abstraction of a person's biometrics, whether it's their face, their palm, their fingerprints, and biometrics is truly the more secure form of understanding who that customer is. So this digital abstraction is really revolutionary because it allows you to create a digital ID of that person using their biometrics and that digital ID unlocks opportunities, financial services opportunities in a digital way for the customer. And are there things that people should be worried about? The biggest thing with biometrics is privacy and security. And we are in the forefront of that as a population, as a global threat. This is not something that's just about biometrics. This is about people's data in general and digital platforms. So biometrics needs to be part of that conversation. How are we making sure people's data stays private and how are we making sure there is true security from end-to-end perspective, from how you deploy the servers and systems to what the customer sees. And part of what we do in ELEMENT is really to solve that problem for a lot of our partners. Let's talk about the Fintech sector. How do you see the Fintech sector reshaping digital financial services? I'm very bold about Fintech and I actually think some bold things are going to happen. As Fintech really came about because of cloud computing, because of open source technology, the barriers to entry to set up a Fintech company is very low. So what I think is going to happen is payments and cost of transactions are just going to get to zero. Because the Fintech company's goal is to keep that digital customer in their platform to continue to transact. So the more they can do that in a cheap way for the customer, the better. Data is also going to be a very important part of a Fintech company in terms of shaping digital financial services. That data is actually going to unlock a lot of opportunities and it's going to create a lot of interesting opportunities for the customer. But my vision and my personal opinion is that we need to figure out a way to marry traditional financial services with Fintech. Because until we really do that, the low income consumer wouldn't be able to really lift themselves out of poverty. They still need mortgages, they still need car loans. That's really what's going to take them out and we need to sort of bring those two worlds together. And finally, what role can governments play, do you think, to enhance the uses of digital financial services at national level? As I mentioned, digital identity is the foundation of a digital ecosystem. And I think governments can be bold in terms of creating digital databases, whether it's on a foundational level or on a functional level. A national ID system that's digital and has an API that companies and government services in the country can access in a digital way. Functional databases. So if you're a banking system or you're a healthcare system, that serves that specific sector. But it brings that industry together to serve the banking world, to serve the healthcare world. If governments do that, that really can revolutionize that digital ecosystem. Suddenly you can start seeing more digital players coming in and doing what banks should be doing, what healthcare companies should be doing. And just providing better opportunities for their citizens. Well Barbara, thank you very much for joining us in the studio today and we hopefully will catch up with you again some stage in the future. Thank you, happy to be here.