 Good evening and welcome to the Fiji Symposium in Bangalore. The platform for all dialogue on financial inclusion and with me is from a partner organization from the Gates Foundation, Jamie Zimmerman. Welcome, Jamie. Thank you. Tell us how does it feel to be part of the first ever Fiji Symposium? Well, it's a really exciting time to bring these different partners together, especially here in Bangalore, in India, kind of the heart of so much innovation in digital financial services and in technology and information communication technology. And it's kind of a wonderful time in even the history of India and all of the innovation that we've seen here in the last few years on digital financial inclusion. So it's really exciting to be able to host the first symposium, bringing together the UN's International Telecommunications Union with the World Bank Group, two very big, very powerful and important organizations with also the Bank for International Settlements as part of this big initiative. And to be able to do it and have the launch event for this initiative in India is a really exciting time. And it's great to see everyone here and there's a lot of great energy in all of the different sessions that I've been in today, so it's really exciting. So as you know, as of today, two billion people are unbanked, yet 1.6 billion out of them have a mobile phone. So what exactly is Fiji and how does it plan to stimulate digital financial inclusion? So Fiji, the Financial Inclusion Global Initiative, it's a three-year program between the partners that I just mentioned, the World Bank, the ITU and the BIS to really bring together the different important policy makers and regulators, private sector stakeholders to look at this opportunity that we have with the access and just the fact that so many people do have more access now to mobile phones and to connectivity and to say, you know, how do we look at this moment and actually do something to accelerate the pace of innovation and scale so that that two billion people also now have access to financial services that they might need to manage their daily lives. So part of that is hosting these symposiums to bring together regulators from the telecommunications sector in different countries with banking regulators and have them beginning to have conversations on important issues like now digital ID and biometric technologies, being able to use mobile phones and cards in the most remote places in the world to access financial services but also what does that mean for consumer protection and data privacy and security and trust in these services now that they're becoming so ubiquitous. So bringing them together in symposiums like this but also a huge part of this particular initiative is to also implement at the country level. So there are lessons that are coming out of the dialogue that we're experiencing here at the symposium, recommendations for policy, recommendations for new technologies, for ways we work together and the goal is to see those implemented and driving change in different countries. We have three countries that are part of this particular initiative. Those are Mexico, Egypt and China but we're hoping that lessons will be applied all over the world. So here at the symposium we have regulators from all corners of the globe coming to talk about what their experiences are in their own markets and how they're approaching it and where they're seeing innovation and so what we're hoping for is by bringing together very important partners for the implementation and also implementing in different markets and sharing lessons back through these symposiums that we're creating this innovation, acceleration and cycle where we're going to see a lot more progress both on the policy side bit also on the infrastructure, building and the implementation side as well. So apart from you know putting down the aggregators and like getting mobile operators and banks together like how it's happening at the symposium apart from that another issue that we kind of want to talk to you about is what according to you are the factors that the poorest of people would prefer to switch over to digital financial services over the traditional method of cash banking what do you think those small factors would be? Well I think there are many and ones that come to mind immediately for me are around security and privacy really that through mobile banking or other forms of digital financial services it is potentially a safer way to hold your money, to save your money and also to transact without ever having to actually have cash in your pocket. So going about your daily life making purchases, sending money home, saving, having access to small amounts of credit so that you can make investments in your small business or in the education of your children, receive your government benefits, any of those types of things that you're able to do that easily, safely and with and securely. I think that there are also a lot of challenges to getting there before people will start to prefer this over cash. There needs to be more ubiquitous access than there is now. And to the different types of people that you would want to transact with first of all if you're going to be making a small payment at a merchant they need to be able to accept the payment. If you're going to, if I wanted to send you money through a mobile phone you need to be able to receive it. There needs to be great network connectivity so that that happens immediately and securely so that I can trust that when I do that you're going to receive that money. And so convenience, access, trust in the system and that it will work are all really core components to actually creating something that creates more value and is and more a bit more utility I guess in someone's life than what they have with cash in their hand. Because cash we know cash and for a lot of people it's what works and there has to be something that works better. Has to be, it has to either be lower cost or the cost has to, what the benefits that you receive from it have to outweigh what it might cost to actually use it. So we have a ways to go before that becomes the case and that's really what Fiji is all about. Correct, it's kind of taking the word out into the world to tell them about the digital financial services and its benefits, right? It's taking the word out but it's also bringing together the decision makers that create the products and services that regulate the communications infrastructure in a country that regulate the financial infrastructure in a country and having them understand what the barriers are to creating that value and that access and that confidence and trust and having them kind of work out the thorny issues and a lot of the conversations we're having here right now are pretty technical ones and they can be rather sticky but if we're unable to, if we are able to unlock some of those barriers and those challenges it's going to make all the difference for being able to achieve our ultimate goals. More specifically to your organization what exactly is the Gates Foundation looking at what are the concerns they're looking at into bridging this digital financial inclusion gap basically? Bringing together partners like the World Bank and ITU and CPMI and the BIS to also share the same objectives that we share but us now being able to support them to focus in on this, on the country implementations, on the working groups that we have discussing different aspects of what it will take to really accelerate inclusive digital financial services is really a core core to what we do and we think that this is going to be a really critical partnership for seeing us reach that goal. Great and it's great to have you on board. Thank you so much. Thank you.