 Well, thank you very much for the kind invitation to come to Dublin and address your share with you the short history of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. It's for us a very important activity and a privilege to be able to share the motivation and experience of this newest Multilateral Development Bank in one of our founding member countries who joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The history of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank really starts with I think the recognition of the huge infrastructure finance needs in the world and in particular in Asia. Many of you may have heard about the large studies that have estimated infrastructure investment needs and the Asian Development Bank estimates 1.7 trillion dollars of investment needs every year. The I think McKinsey Global Institute has estimated that globally infrastructure investments should achieve six trillion dollars a year and that's globally and includes high income countries, huge numbers. I don't know I really understand what a trillion is but it's a big number and the actual investments are about half of that need. Now one can talk a lot about what need means and I'll come back to that in a moment but that's sort of the the initial motivation for the creation of our bank. Infrastructure really is about connecting people and markets in most developing countries. Infrastructure really is about removing bottlenecks. Traffic congestion, pollution, flooding. I came from Jakarta overnight where you may have read just on New Year's Eve a very large part of the city was underwater literally with fatalities and terrible damage and ultimately because of lack of investment inadequate water and sanitation for example. So therefore a city of 50 million people abstracts groundwater at unsustainable rates and parts of the city sink at 25 centimeters a year and for a city that is already mostly under sea level you can imagine what that means. Just as an illustration for the importance of meeting investment needs where there isn't enough investment. Now then there's another story which is infrastructure investment is a driver for economic development. If you look at China in particular and what comes to mind is less the filling of bottlenecks much more the forward-looking investment 20,000 kilometers of high-speed rail and other incredibly ambitious projects to drive economic development which is another side of the infrastructure investment story and and then infrastructure investment needs are changing. They're changing first because of population changes because of urbanization the population of cities and developing countries grows by one million people every week one million every week it's the number you need to I like that number because it's so dramatic until 2050 one million people additional population and urban cities in developing countries every week that's another Hong Kong every two months or I can give any other example I think that that gives you a sense of the the dramatic investment needs for serving these populations. Climate change changes the infrastructure that's needed 40 percent of carbon emissions come directly from the energy sector another 20 percent from the transport sector so unless investment profiles are changed dramatically toward a decarbonized investment this I think just no way to for example achieve the Paris agreement and trade patterns are changing we can talk later about the Belt and Road as an example but also trade disruption trade wars mean that or economic integration in Europe of course we know how much trade in Europe has changed but ASEAN is another example in our geography where something similar is happening where countries are coming together forming new trade links that are very different from the historic trade links that first require new infrastructure or can be enhanced with no infrastructure and lastly technology infrastructure tomorrow will look very very different from today and so that need for infrastructure investments is what motivated our bank and now not in a straight line because if I didn't say it you would say it there's plenty of money around there are trillions and trillions of dollars invested in zero and negative yielding assets and I'm not sure within this room but we get visitors from asset managers literally every week who are asking us where can we invest and so there's plenty of money to go around to invest in infrastructure and so it is not simply about just financing infrastructure it is actually a story about matching demand and supply that don't meet okay and so we have to understand why don't they meet if we want to understand why we need a new bank and because simply the money is not the issue you need to ask why does the money that is there that is looking for investment opportunities not meet the need and they need to unpack a very complex agenda that starts with macroeconomic environment in certain countries where you will find very little opportunities to invest because of macroeconomic instability goes to the policy environment in certain sectors and where if there aren't adequate tariffs you cannot actually privately finance a project because the money cannot be generated inside the company it goes to some projects which may be needed to meet the SDGs but which don't have the economic financial return that could justify private investment and it goes to the more practical issues of project preparation most many of our member countries don't have the technical capacity to prepare well designed bankable projects but need a lot of support in in doing that not only in terms of technical preparation but also in financial structure so that actually private investors could put their money into that kind of project so it's just a number of reasons why you have this huge need and you have this huge amount of capital and the two don't meet and it is traditionally the multilateral development banks the world bank the adb the ebi the eib and others who have played the critical role of helping countries connect these pieces they have helped countries reform their policy environment helped countries put in place adequate cost recovery helped countries prepare projects helped the technical assistance to implement projects helped bring trust of private investors to put their money in those projects helped channel resources from capital markets to those projects and so the multilateral development banks have actually the instruments that can address the gap and so it was not that far fetched that when china proposed to create a new multilateral development bank that it would be focused specifically on the infrastructure challenge and specifically on bridging that gap the second reason why china proposed the creation of the asian infrastructure investment bank was in all likelihood the frustration that it has been very difficult to grow the activities of the existing banks because that would have been an alternative would have been to capitalize more existing institutions but that has been very difficult because those institutions have been and remain dominated by the traditional g7 countries and for emerging countries it's been very difficult to increase their share or to promote substantial increase in the activities of those existing banks and so the combination of the need the ability of multilateral development banks to actually address a critical gap and the challenge of reforming existing institutions in their governance was the reason for china's proposal to create this new bank so what happened since china's president shijing ping proposed the idea of this new bank in 2013 in 2015 china invited many countries to join the creation the negotiations for the creation of this bank and many countries followed in the end there were 57 founding members who negotiated the articles of agreement and in particular european countries joined the aib based on two premises the first one was true multilateral governance meaning a firm legal framework with clear rights and responsibilities of all member countries with decision-making mechanisms that were transparent and clear and that would ensure that every member country would have certain rights and that the bank would not be dominated by its largest member in particular china and secondly and the expectation was that this bank would follow international project standards and would not follow the suspicions that i think at that time were quite widespread that this bank would implement financing or would finance dirty projects or would contribute to indebtedness of countries or finance projects that would cause harm to people or the environment and so these two aspects multilateral governance and international project standards were from the beginning firmly embedded in the framework for aib i think the third pillar that i would add is the commitment to sound banking the commitment that this bank would have to be financially sustainable different from other developments from some of the development banks who rely on permanent inflow of taxpayers money from in particular richer member countries the ideas that aib would become financially sustainable once it received the capital contribution from its members so this were the three foundations multilateral governance international project standards and sound banking and the negotiations then concluded and led to the creation of aib which opened its doors in january 2016 pretty much the day four years ago the 57 founding members committed subscribe capital of 100 billion dollars of which 20 billion dollars would be paid in so we are working with a paid in capital of 20 billion dollars and additional guarantees from our members of 80 billion dollars since then we have adopted policies and strategies obviously the policies that implement the commitment to international standards on environment and social policies transparency disclosure public disclosure of our operations you can see what we're doing on our website and other instruments that's on the policy side we've adopted strategies for example in the energy sector to show what we can and cannot do for example with regard to fossil fuel financing to implement our commitment to be a green bank a bank that was founded literally or opened its doors literally weeks after the Paris agreement came into being and therefore is a very I think deep commitment to the implementation of the Paris agreement on climate change so we have policies and strategies and we have put our finance financing in place our basic financial structure like other multilateral development banks we use our capital that's contributed by member countries the 20 billion dollars plus the 80 billion dollars of guarantees to raise funds in the capital markets we obtained the AAA rating from the three international rating agencies that allows us to capture resources in capital markets at the lowest possible cost in May 2019 we issued our debut bond so for the first time we did issue bonds in the capital markets two and a half billion dollars at a spread equivalent to that of world bank eib and other top tier multilateral development financing institution that's critical for us because with that financing we can then provide loans and investments to our members at the lowest possible cost that's on the financing side on the operational side and we have been blessed by a very strong support from our peer institutions the world bank adb eb ad eib ifc with who we have co-financed from the beginning many of our operations so i joined aib in april 2016 from the world bank at that time i was the 27th staff so we had virtually no capacity of our own at that time so we started operating by co-financing with the world bank with the Asian Development Bank and others and a quiet experience through that approach and at the same time build our own capacity by now we've invested 12 billion dollars in some 60 projects last year four and a half billion this year will be five and a half billion and so each year we'll increase our financial volumes until we expect then 2030 we'll probably finance something like 14 15 billion dollars a year nobody knows what the world will look like in 2030 but that's what our projections say we can do and we plan to do and what do we do and we finance large scale infrastructure one of our first projects was co-financed with the world bank and other mdbs a large gas pipeline to take gas from the caskin sea azar by john through turkey georgia turkey into europe tanap one of those typical eight billion dollar mega projects very important for sustainable gas supply and on the other hand we finance small local infrastructure in indonesia slum upgrading along to the government to finance small 50 000 projects to put a sewage pipe into a low-income neighborhood or to pave the access road but thousands of those projects so many many small investments that actually make people's lives better but very small scale in addition many renewable energy projects solar energy one of the largest solar parks in egypt we finance again together with other development banks and we've increasingly financed private investment in infrastructure the first private power plant in Myanmar a very difficult market was something we financed together with ifc no private investment would have come into Myanmar if it had not been for the multilateral development banks to provide the assurance that the offtaker in this case the government power company would honor the payment obligations that's one of the typical roles we play so in this case private money came in because we were part of it and could assure the investors that the bills would be paid that's a very typical role in mdb plays and more recently we have invested in some innovative structures with asset managers together created bond funds for sustainable investment in infrastructure in asia to bring esg environment social governance certification into the asian infrastructure market a different structure to help recycle infrastructure assets worked with a singaporean entity to create an entity that buys ongoing projects from commercial banks who then can reinvest the new projects and sell those banks to institutional investors like insurance companies and a very important structure to address the original issue i described the lack of demand and supply meeting because much of the money is in institutional investors who actually don't have the appetite to invest in individual projects but are very interested investing in pools of diversified and large-scale infrastructure projects that we are creating through this structure so by now we have 300 staff so we've grown we're still a small entity but we've grown to 300 staff and they have more capability to actually work with countries on the preparation of more complex projects and after four years i think our our sort of assessment is it's gone well it's gone well because our members have upheld their commitment to the basic agreements that underpin our bank and that's multilateral governance multi international standards and sound banking those commitments are really held very deeply by our members and i want to explicitly say including china because that's what allows us as staff and management to actually build an efficient and effective bank and because the basic foundation really has very strong support from our members and that is absolutely important very few if any decisions have been taken in a very controversial way i think typically like in the boards of traditional mdbs most decisions are taken in consensus most decisions are supported by the vast majority of members rather than pushed through by a small number and in this case china as our largest member by the way china holds 26 percent of the shares so china is the largest shareholder but cannot dominate so that china has 26 percent it is followed by india as the second largest shareholder russia germany korea so a diverse set of large shareholders but a very different set from other mdbs and of course while we have now a very wide membership which has grown from the 57 founding members to 102 members and the u.s and japan have still so far decided to stay outside they will always be welcome but have so far not joined our bank so in summary we are quite happy with the success over the building of our bank and personally if i may add that it's been extremely rewarding experience to take the experience i've had from the world bank in many years to a startup organization and frankly it's a pretty unique opportunity to have a startup situation where you have the freedom of really shaping a new institution and yet you have the very strong financial backing of hundred billion dollars of capital and you have the incredible political visibility that we've had so it's a quite unusual quite privileged situation we have which is why i myself but also my colleagues have i think enjoyed the ride tremendously and feel quite proud of what we have achieved and and feel very happy with the strong support by our members and ireland of course is one of our members and in that sense i'm very happy to report here that i think the initial decisions which i'm sure was also in ireland not an easy one and i think is well justified by the developments that have occurred over the last four years in particular i think what we hope we will contribute is on the one hand help address the infrastructure finance gap that i talked about in the beginning that's our mandate that's our focus so we hope that as we grow we will make an increasingly significant contribution toward narrowing that gap bringing demand and supply for finance and infrastructure for tomorrow together focusing very much on infrastructure for tomorrow meaning infrastructure that is environmentally sustainable infrastructure that uses technology infrastructure that connects new regions in the world and and infrastructure that mobilizes private capital but secondly i do think that the creation of aib and the realm of success if i may call it and i think also strengthens the overall system of multilateral institutions and because it demonstrates that an emerging country china can successfully bring together a large number of countries to build an effective institution i think that's actually quite an important contribution especially at a time where multilateralism seems sometimes under threat and i don't think it can be under threat because the global challenges are so big that there is just no doubt about the critical importance of international institutions multilateral institutions and yet i think it's a hopeful sign that a new institution can be created can be effective and can be initiated by china which has not traditionally been able to play that role and so we hope that we can in that way also contribute to the robustness of really multilateral cooperation and strengthen the multilateral system rather than just our own bank so that's what i want to share to kick us off but i'm happy to tell you more or respond to any questions or comments you may have thank you thank you very comprehensive