 I'm delighted to have in the studio with me Tim Lyman. Tim works with the consultative group to assist the poor, CGAP. It's a Washington-based think tank supported by the World Bank, but with a larger community of 35 international donors. So quite a big organization spanning many areas. Tim, thank you very much for coming in. Could you tell us a little bit about this think tank? What it was set up for and what it aims to achieve? CGAP was set up really to deal with the problem that a very large number of poor people around the world do not have reliable and consistent and affordable access to formal finance, leaving them vulnerable to all of the unpredictability and expense and potential for abuse of money lenders and informal means of transacting. You focus then particularly on digital solutions to this problem? This has become really what we believe to be the answer to the problem. It's the answer both because it provides potential to reduce the cost of tiny transactions dramatically and it also provides means of transacting potentially that meets the needs of poor people who have uneven income, uneven expenses, unpredictable income and unpredictable expenses, and digital offers them a way to transact in the tiny amounts that they have available and potentially to have access to a full range of financial services to serve their needs. It's a safe system. Is it usable by people in poor countries? Is literacy or numeracy a problem when trying to introduce such services? I would say it is a problem. It's a problem that is lessening with the spread of smartphones and visual user interfaces. And that's actually one of the things that we think is very exciting about the potential. It is a very different story from SMS messages which of course do require some level of numeracy or literacy, at least on the part of someone helping the user. But with a graphic interface, the possibility is there to design products that are really usable by people with- More user-friendly and are you looking at, I mean, for example, as technology moves ahead, things like text to voice, where you could in theory support many local languages over a platform like Siri offers on the iPhone and other providers are now developing as well. Absolutely, and in fact, it's exactly these kind of frontier topics that are sort of a sweet spot. Over the years that we have existed in the financial inclusion sphere, we've been always trying to be on the forefront of responsible market development to serve more people and we do see digital as the next big thing. So you're here at ITU now to participate in this special focus group on digital financial services. Why did you want to be involved in this group? What do you think you can contribute and what will you get out of it? So I actually am the lead on our global policy architecture initiative and I work in the policy regulatory and supervisory arena. Thus far, the conversation has been among financial sector regulators and financial sector standard setting bodies and the exciting development with the formation of the focus group is to bridge what is an important to bridge gap between the telecommunications sphere and the financial sector sphere which is already being bridged by necessity by policy makers at the country level but this is really the first opportunity we have to bring that conversation to a global level. I wondered how difficult that might be actually because they're both quite highly regulated sectors in their own right, the telecom sector and the financial sector. Is there a culture clash or can the two sectors understand each other and work easily together? I don't think there is a culture clash so much as being accustomed to two very different mandates and each has to learn enough about the other to understand both where the risks lie and how to mitigate them. How important do you think this could be for socioeconomic development, perhaps not just in the world's poorest countries but actually over many countries? I was interested to hear another interviewee from Russia saying that they also have a very large unbanked community, something I was surprised about and he said that he felt this was a problem worldwide not just in the world's poorest nations. No, this is a fact. Seagaps focuses on the poorer people and we also applaud the recognition and I would say it's an increasing recognition that financial exclusion is a problem across the country income spectrum. So the G20 has formed the Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion which is an inclusive platform that brings together not only G20 members but also interested emerging market and developing economies and we are very pleased to be an implementing partner of the so-called GPFI, Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion and in fact there was a really groundbreaking gathering just at the end of October in Basel which is the seat of four of the six most important financial sector standard setting bodies specifically on digital financial inclusion and recognizing that the domains of the separate financial sector standard setting bodies are converging with the phenomenon of digital financial inclusion and digital financial services generally and at that gathering it was also acknowledged that the conversation needs to broaden still to include organizations like the ITU that are important guides to what is happening at the country level in terms of regulation and policy formulation. I think it is a good fit for ITU for two reasons actually because we were very strong on standards development but also because for us it's very exciting to see what you might call a reverse skills transfer with things like M-PACE are developing in Kenya where you see perhaps not for the first time but maybe the most impressive instance of a platform that was developed in a poor country that's now being transferred out to other perhaps more affluent markets. Do you think we'll see more of that kind of thing coming out of the developing world? I do think that the models of digital financial inclusion that are emerging there's no question that the places where scale is being reached first are poor countries. Now in part that's because those are the places where people have fewest alternatives and you have countries where a huge majority of the population does not have access to the most basic financial services. It's natural that this is the place where the first learning will happen. I think it's great that the more affluent countries are recognizing as I mentioned increasingly that they also have issues with financial exclusion and particularly in certain market segments and are learning lessons from the emerging markets and developing countries. It's really a very exciting area to be working in Tim Lyman. Thank you so much for joining me. Yeah, my pleasure.