 Good morning and welcome. We are coming to you from day two of the Fiji Symposium in Bangalore, the platform for all talks on financial inclusion. And with me today is the chairman of TRAA, Mr. R.S. Sharma. So welcome to the Fiji Symposium and thank you for being part of this. So tell me how does it feel to be part of the first ever Fiji Symposium in our home country, India? Wonderful. Actually I have been associated with ITU and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, all these three partners who are actually in a way partnering in this conference. So it's really wonderful that we are having the first conference in the Silicon Valley of India. Could you tell us a little more about the potential of the digital financial services to actually increase financial inclusion? See what has happened is that we have realized very soon in the day that it is important to have, you know, if you want to have a financial inclusion at the scale which India requires, you cannot do it through a brick and mortar structure of the bank and you need to have, you know, digital transactions taking place. India also has the peculiarity of, you know, a small pouch solution. So basically there'll be digital transactions of very small values of 10 rupees, 12 rupees and all that. So that and numbers are very large. So therefore to have a scalable, cost-effective digital transaction is very, very important. It's also important that no one player can provide all the solutions. So therefore you must put down a framework on which people can build their solutions and applications. So therefore interoperability is also very important and once you have interoperability, you'll be required to have open standards and open APIs. So I think what is important is to have an architecture for a scalable, cost-effective digital transactions to happen. Of course, connectivity will be an enabler because without connectivity, without broadband nothing will happen. So therefore these are some of the important enablers, but I see the way the honorable prime minister has taken upon himself the job of, you know, cashless India or less cash India. I think that's a great sort of incentive for people to do digital transactions and the growth which is being witnessed in the area of digital transaction really is, you know, shows the way. And with coming to the Aadhaar and unified payment interface, your views on that and the benefits that it is going to give out to all the public. You see Aadhaar is an identity infrastructure. It's a digital identity infrastructure. It has got two, you know, properties. Property number one is that it is a unique infrastructure, unique for every individual. So therefore Aadhaar uniquely identifies a person. The second property is it can authenticate online. So Aadhaar is the only digital identity which can participate in digital transactions. And therefore it is very central to the whole issue of digital financial inclusion. In fact, digital financial inclusion was one of the first applications which was rolled out in Aadhaar, where we talked of Aadhaar enabled payment systems. We call AAPS. We also had Aadhaar payment bridge in which the government is able to directly transfer subsidies or other benefits to a person's account using just Aadhaar number without even knowing the bank account and the bank to which his account is. So therefore Aadhaar as a universal financial address is another every important, you know, thing which has happened. So therefore Aadhaar has played an extremely important role in enabling digital financial inclusion. And its property of authentication is actually playing the role. And now what has happened is that we are linking all the 1.2 billion mobiles with Aadhaar number. Now having done that, then what happens? Mobile becomes a real proxy digital identity. And therefore once you have just mobile and you have your pin, so you have only two factor authentication. So basically you are able to do using this, you know, Aadhaar and mobile, the transactions. And once you link your bank account also, then you are very sure that the person who is actually doing to do Aadhaar transaction is really the person who he is. So therefore what has happened? It's a layered innovation which has taken place. So what's happening is we have unbundled the identity authentication from bank account operation. So bank account, bank people did not really get into the area of, you know, biometrics and all that identity, that specialized agency like UIDI is doing. So once you do that, then you reduce the burden of the bank. And therefore it becomes a much more frictionless, interoperable, you know, cost effective transaction system. So therefore Aadhaar is central to that digital financial inclusion. Also what do you think that the world's people who are below poverty line, what will it take for them to actually prefer digital financial services over the traditional methods of cash? See, I believe that there are certain, you know, challenges which must be addressed in order to, you know, roll out digital financial transactions at a very massive scale. Some of the challenges have been, you know, taken care of like interoperability standards and mobile based transactions. But four things I call them four Cs. One is cost. Therefore the digital transaction must be cost effective. It must be in fact of less costly than the physical transaction. So maybe you can provide, you can incentivize the digital transaction. So one is very, very important is cost. And if you think that, you know, I am doing a transaction of 10 rupees, and you can take two rupees from that as a part of the transaction, then I'll never do it. So I'll continue to do it in cash unless I'm given incentives. So that's number one. Second is convenience. The other C is convenient, which is also very important because if you if you are doing it and you you are finding it very difficult, inconvenient to do it, then then nobody will do it. You know, if you take out for 10 rupees transaction, you can take out 10 to be note and give it to the person. But if you have to, you know, do it and you know, you put it out and then you enter all kinds of numbers, account numbers, etc. It doesn't work. So therefore, convenience is also important. And that can be addressed through better software design, better interface design, better, you know, one time authentications of mobile number and other kinds of things. Third is essentially confidence. You need to have confidence in the system. That's a matter of trust. If I trust the system that why using the digital financial transaction, my money is not going to go away. That's then I'll use it more often and more. So that's one part. And last but not the least is the connectivity. So I need to have connectivity in order to do that. Therefore, I need to have access to broadband, access to data. So these four C's, you know, cost, convenience, confidence and you know, connectivity are very important. Another factor which is more important is behavioral changes. You know, in terms of, you know, in terms of we are cash, we are largely a cash economy. People prefer called mindset. That mindset has to change. And that can be tackled through various means. One of the means is digital, you know, empowerment of people. They must be, you know, digital, digitally literate. So digital literacy is also extremely important. So I think all these things will have to come together to ensure that we are able to roll out digital financial transactions in a very big way. That's great. That's great. So in terms of the role of TRAI, what is the next step for digital financial services in India? See, TRAI believes in openness, consultation. And TRAI believes in, you know, creating policy frameworks, which a TRAI is not an implementer, but TRAI certainly provides policy inputs to the government and also perform certain other functions. So TRAI has taken a couple of steps. One is, you know, we advise the government to implement Bharat Net in a public-private partnership way. So that's that's one part, because we think ubiquitous broadband connectivity is extremely important for all digital services, whether it is digital financial inclusion or any other government services. So that's one part. Secondly, we reduce the USSD charges, because in India 60% of the mobiles are still feature phones. And if you want to enable them to do financial transactions, you need to, you know, sort of, they can use only the USSD channel. And there we reduce the fees to one-third of what it was earlier and increase the steps which one can do. The third thing which we have done is essentially we are, you know, creating an architecture again of an interoperable Wi-Fi hotspot. So wherever you go, you are able to, you know, get connected. And you can purchase that connectivity on a single click. You don't need to, you know, do all kinds of authentication, because you can authenticate once. You can, you know, set up your purchase preferences as to what is the mode through which you would like to pay for the bandwidth. And then you can purchase the bandwidth. Many times, the grocery shop owners themselves will like you to provide a free bandwidth so that you can do transactions with them. And UPI framework, actually it's an extremely robust framework, which allows multi-party, you know, sort of agreement and trust through the PKI infrastructure, which is extremely critical. And that's again a very, very beautiful design where you are not creating some simple quick solutions, but you are creating a solution based on a robust architecture. So that's where we are actually experimenting and currently the POC and the pilot is going on to have an interoperable grid of Wi-Fi hotspots throughout the country. So that will be another part. Lastly, we have issued a recommendation to the government on net neutrality, which we feel is extremely important from many angles, but certainly from the financial inclusion angle, because if financial transactions, people start, you know, taking calls in that, or people start degrading one competitor's, you know, sort of access to their servers, then it doesn't work. Therefore, there should be absolutely no discrimination in terms of the transactions. We also believe that many domains we have seen that the financial transactions, some, you know, sort of commission or whatever is charged is levied by the banks depending on, you know, the value of the transaction. This is absolutely not correct, because the telecom service providers must be paid for the data they will, not for the transaction value, because if I do a one-million transaction and you say give me five percent of that, that doesn't work. So therefore, I think it should be completely, you know, neutral and that recommendation we have given to the government and we feel that an open plate, internet as an open platform is extremely important for India for innovation systems, for financial inclusion, for various government applications, and for various other things. So therefore, we must have unhindered access to the internet. Nobody knows the, nobody owns the internet and therefore internet should be accessible by everybody. So I think we have, we are taking steps consciously to ensure that citizens have much, you know, citizens have a frictionless access to the internet, are able to do transactions in a, in a hassle-free manner. That's great. I really hope all these recommendations can actually come into being sooner than later. Let's hope so. Thank you so much sir. Thank you so much. Thank you very much.