 Good morning and welcome. We're coming to you from day three of the Fiji Symposium in Bangalore, the platform for all dialogue on financial inclusion. And with me today is the Deputy Director for Financial Services for the Poor from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mr. Daniel Radcliffe. Welcome Daniel and thank you for being part of the Fiji Symposium. Thanks Anush. It's great to be here. I appreciate the time to chat about it. That's great. This is the first ever Fiji Symposium. Your thoughts on this? Well, I think the timing is right for Fiji and the reason I say that is five, six years ago mobile money or DFS through telephones was a nascent domain. You just didn't have huge amounts of transaction volumes running through these platforms. Today we're starting to see big growth in mobile money deployments all around the world. That creates a whole new set of challenges and risks around cyber security, fraud, etc. These are things that the traditional financial inclusion community is just not exposed to. So in this new environment it's now critical time to bring in the standard setting bodies of banking, BIS, the standard setter around development policy, the World Bank, and then thirdly now the standard setter around telecoms which brings a much more sophisticated level of expertise around cyber security, fraud, using the telephone. So now is the time to actually bring in that level of technical expertise as mobile money platforms grow globally. Could you also tell us a little more about the potential of digital financial services to actually increase financial inclusion? Yeah, so first off one of the interesting questions we had five, six years ago was would mobile payment systems and DFS systems from these non-bank providers, would they cannibalize banks and their business? In fact, we're seeing the opposite. In the most advanced markets in terms of volumes, Kenya, Tanzania, we're seeing these mobile money platforms actually serve as a springboard for the core banking sector to expand its customer base, to expand its available credit, and that's a big deal. We didn't know that was going to be the case four or five years ago. And so now we're reaching this point where we can credibly go to banks and say, listen, do you stand to benefit from allowing these new players into the business because they allow you to identify customers remotely, they allow you to access customers remotely using telephone, and they will allow you to access a huge trove of data through the SIM card that can then be used to inform credit scores. And so it's now reaching this true win-win opportunity between banks and the non-bank payment providers, so that creates a massive opportunity not just to onboard poor people into a transaction account, but to connect them to a whole suite of services. The last point I'll say on this is that all those things I just described, access to a trove of data, being able to interconnect to the core banking system, that all requires a new set of technical standards that requires interoperability standards, not just between mobile money providers, but also between the mobile money systems and the core banking systems. It also requires data privacy standards that allow that trove of data to be shared in a safe, secure way and used soundly by the providers. And so for those reasons, to catalyze this expansion into real financial inclusion, it's now a time when we need a new set of standards, and that's why we're bringing together BIS, ITU and the World Bank. Now that we know the good points about digital financial services, what are the few factors that you think might be the deciding factors for people below poverty line to actually prefer digital financial services over the traditional methods of cash? Really good question. It's got to be extremely cheap. We can't have scenarios where people are having to pay fees every time they're doing transactions when cash is just a free service. It's an easy service. The second is convenience, particularly in terms of proximity, that the likelihood that a poor person will walk two, three kilometers to conduct transactions is minimal. That's in part why we're going to need regulators to figure out those distribution networks, allowing those companies that have the distribution networks into the space in a safe way. I think a third hook is going to be government transfers. You look at the poorest, most vulnerable households in the world, many of them don't have liquid cash or significant amounts of liquid cash to engage in DFS. Poor vulnerable households also should be very strong candidates for social welfare payments. Those social welfare payments can be a powerful onboarding trigger, but they can also be structured in a way that pulls people into financial behaviors. You get your monthly welfare payment into your account and press 1 if you want to divert 10% of that each month into a long-term savings account. Press 2 if you'd like future payments to be diverted into a school fee account, etc. These are some of the hooks that I think will be important. You have quite a few things that we can actually use to help them prefer digital financial services. When it comes down to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, what exactly is your organization's role in increasing financial inclusion and how important is it for everyone to move towards this? Our role is really to try to place bets that we often think of as a three-legged stool. Government is, of course, absolutely essential, but taxpayer dollars are, by nature, risk averse. It's very hard for government bodies to take risks with taxpayer money. Secondly, you have the private sector, which, of course, is going to be an essential player, but the private sector, by its nature, is going to be focused on profit-maximizing in general. That creates the third leg of the stool, which is philanthropic money. We don't always succeed, but our goal should be to place risky bets like this one, bringing together behemoth standard-setting bodies, and take those risks that are needed to move the industry forward. Specifically, in terms of what we're working on, the first pillar that we work on is something that I focus on, which is our regulatory policy change. That we do at a global level through efforts like this, but also at a country level. We have program officers in eight focused countries. The second pillar that we focus on is the payment infrastructure that countries develop. I think when we look at payment systems around the world, they tend to be built on legacy technology. They're often built to favor incumbent players at the center. They have cost floors that are quite high and impede any incentive to expand out into poor and rural communities. We have a team of payment technologists that are working with the World Bank and BIS and others to establish an open-source code library that guides countries off the shelf. They can take this technology to build more inclusive, lower-cost payment technologies using the latest thinking in payment systems. The third piece of what we're working on is usage. How do we trigger excluded population segments? What are the ways to incorporate them into the system? There's no expectation that digital finance is going to be right for everybody at every scenario, but there are some low-hanging fruit opportunities to use government payment systems and credit systems to hook people into the DFS, those who could benefit from it. The last pillar is a research portfolio that is aiming to pressure test. Are these welfare linkages we have in our mind, are they true? When people have access to a payment system, does their household welfare increase? When a government goes from cash to digital, does household welfare increase? Do fiscal savings increase? Does corruption go down? This we really only can measure rigorously through randomized control trials, so a lot of that portfolio is trying to identify opportunities to randomize access to a savings account, access to payments, and then we use that data to pressure test our own strategy is what we're doing actually helping people, but secondly to inform advocacy, because if we find that the Indian government is saving a significant amount of money through direct benefit transfer, you want to have the data to be able to take that to the Nigerians and to the Mexicans and make a case with the central bank that this is worth testing. Those are the four pillars and I think that the key message across all of this is that everyone benefits from an economy that includes everyone, so that's where payments as a connective tissue to include everyone in an economy is at the core of what we work on. I think the Gates Foundation is doing an amazing job at this and thank you so much for being part of the Fiji Symposium. Great, thanks Anu. Thanks.