 Thanks for tuning into this segment of the Global Inclusive Growth Summit on setting the global agenda for financial security. My name's Ida Rademacher. I'm a Vice President at the Aspen Institute, and I lead our financial security program. I also co-chair the Aspen Partnership for an Inclusive Economy. One of the animating ideas behind this session that helped us select our speaker lineup for today is that financial inclusion and financial security at the household level is foundational to creating a strong, sustainable, and resilient economy. An inclusive financial system prevents a really powerful economic tool. Research from the International Monetary Fund has shown a two to three percentage point GDP growth difference between, in the long run, those countries that are financially inclusive and their less inclusive peers. Over the past decade, we have made tremendous progress on greater inclusion through a series of actions taken by leaders in government, in the financial industry, and in the social sector. In 2010, the Group of 20, the G20, elevated financial inclusion to the global agenda with the creation and launch of the Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion. And in 2011, the Alliance for Financial Inclusion created the Maya Declaration, which was the first global measurable set of financial inclusion commitments made by nations. That has since perpetuated through the World Bank's commitments to help countries and now more than 50 countries have national financial inclusion strategies in place. In addition, the World Bank launched the Global Findex, which is the most comprehensive data set showing how adults borrow, save, spend, and manage risk in over 140 countries. Technology and market developments have also been a big part of playing to the financial inclusion successes of the last decade. The new digital and mobile technologies, the emergence of fintechs, and the global dynamic and diverging financial services sector is part of the success story of the last decade. But with momentum, the reason we are here today is to recognize that there is still significant work to do. Real challenges remain and new challenges have emerged, reaching and serving a set of households and small businesses worldwide that are disproportionately led by women and people of color. And while reaching and including those populations is critical, simplistic measures of account access that we have defaulted to to define success actually fail to capture whether that access is truly enhancing people's financial security, their well-being, their health, and their dignity. The conversations are designed to help us all think about what the agenda needs to look like for the next decade. As the world moves toward recovery from the pandemic, reshaping our financial systems will play a critical role in ensuring that in the next decade, and better still the next century, we have more success and a different-looking system that is inclusive of everyone. To kick us off, I have the pleasure of talking with Her Majesty Queen Maxima of the Netherlands. In 2009, she has served as the United Nations Secretary General Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development. She's also an honorary patron of the G20's Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion, and she's a global agenda trustee for the World Economic Forum's Global Challenge Initiative on the Future of the Global Financial System. In all of her roles, Queen Maxima is a tireless advocate for expanding economic inclusion. It's a pleasure to have the opportunity to talk with her. Her Majesty Queen Maxima, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us today. Well, it's a pleasure to join you. Thank you very much for having me, Ada. In your role now for over a decade as the United Nations Secretary General Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development, you've been one of the world's leading voices, not only on the need for financial inclusion as a way to address poverty, but also the way that financial inclusion helps with inclusive growth and with lessening of inequality. I am curious now, on the others as we're coming out of a pandemic, what do you think the lessons that pandemic have taught us about financial inclusion, about how inclusive our financial systems are, and about how our systems need to be more inclusive? Well, you know, as you very well mentioned, I've been doing this work for more than 12 years, and in those 12 years, I think we've actually been able to engage 1.3 plus billion more people into the financial system. So in that regard, it's been successful. Now, the whole thing is financial inclusion is a means to an end, right? It's, you know, you don't become better by being financially included. What I want with you when you're financially included is that you actually use it for your better outcomes in your life. And what do I mean by that? That you have a better possibility to save, that you can actually make ends meet, that you can actually make fronts to, you know, unforeseen shocks, being sickness, being droughts, being floods, and being able to plan for the future and being able to invest in the future. Is it education for your children, or is it in a small little company? And so the whole idea between financial inclusion is not just having access to affordable and safe financial services, but, you know, to really use them to your benefit. Now, having said that, we still have 1.7 billion, million adults, billion adults in the world that do not have access to financial services. And you know, even those that they do, do not really always make good use of it. So that we're talking, I hope in the future about financial health. But also we have, you know, very particular segments that are actually having, you know, much less access. And that's the equality issue that some of us were talking about. For example, 63% of African women do not have access to financial services. In terms of small whole of farmers, 270 million farmers need $290 billion a year in investments to really make their farms grow, but 70% of that demand grows unmet. So I think these are the type of things that, you know, we need to start looking into a lot more the needs of women, the needs of small whole of farmers, and the need of micro small business enterprises across the board. And yet a very big issue is once you're actually in it, you are financially included, that you really are financially healthy, that it doesn't go into over-endedness, but actually into more cushions, more buffers, and more possibilities for your future. I think that economic dignity at the core of what you're talking about is been evolving as a more and more front and center focus of financial inclusion. And the work that over the past year, I want to call out, you have chaired an international working group on financial health, and I've had the fortune and pleasure of participating in that. Simultaneously, here at Aspen, we have led an effort around defining a next generation set of principles for global financial inclusion, and your team has participated in that. The headline coming out of both of the reports, and the work on both sides, was this call for outcomes, was really trying to set a new standard for reminding everybody of the purpose of financial inclusion to what you just said, and to really kind of put that forward as the next generation goals when we think out to the future. When you think about the ensuring of the adoption of financial health, financial well-being, and outcomes orientation, what do you think it's going to take to move us toward adoption of that? Because it is much harder to measure than access. First of all, you cannot measure something if you cannot define it. So the first step in this working group that I, you know, it's already some years I had it in my mind, we have to have like a working group that's no clear global definition of financial health. So that's the one thing we actually were able to sort of establish together. And then we have discussed about what are the KPIs that, you know, we should be measuring financial health with. And also, you know, the situation in the Netherlands would be very different than that actually in Cote d'Ivoire. So, but if we have, we can actually come up with a normal standard set of KPIs in which we can actually outcomes, are people becoming better by using the financial services? And let us be honest, you know, in the U.S., 90 percent of the people are financially included, maybe underband by several KPIs. But the one thing we know that only 30 percent feel comfortable in their financial lives, they do not have financial stress. The same thing goes in many, many other countries. So we're seeing this in emerging markets as well, that, you know, sometimes financial inclusion might actually too much to over-in-deadness and not enough to what we want to actually have as an outcome, to have actually better buffers built for your future and actually have a very balanced financial life. So, I mean, in all OECD countries, half of the respondents, they made a huge survey and half of the respondents said that they actually have trouble making it to the end of the month, 50 percent of all OECD respondents. So there is something we need to talk about, which is, what is the job of a financial sector? The aspect principles are very complementary to the working group that I did on financial health with the participation of everybody in the community that talks about financial health. And to see, you know, what are the KPIs on your clients, if you're a financial service provider, what are the KPIs that I need to look for? How do I nut them to save them better? Is that insurance really something that he needs or he needs another type of insurance? And so it is three-fold that we need to do. First of all, speak to policymakers because, I mean, they will need to do the very big surveys and really analyze, you know, what type of groups are being left behind, what type of policies I will be able to do. Also in the product, you know, when you accept a product of a financial service product, you know, is this going to lead to better financial life, yes or not? But also from the private sector perspective, it's extremely important that we are going to create a platform now, and I'm very happy that MasterCard is going to be participating in which we're going to start to share ideas and share ways of actually, you know, how do you get this data of your clients? How do you get, you know, where it's hidden sometimes is data of financial health. How do we get it, first of all, and how do we actually start testing products that actually could have turned into better outcomes? So these three things, these two things are very important. And lastly is to keep on this KPI conversation and start to get, you know, this data collection in a much more rigorous and, I would say, consistent way. Without this, we will not be able to make policy, we're not going to be able to make advocacy, and we're not going to be able to make change. I think that with the continued leadership that you have demonstrated with the CEO partnership that you have been spearheading, there is a very robust next chapter, because the next step for leadership is what will change that measurement in an upward trajectory? How will you get people experiencing more deeply stable, secure lives with a lot of choice and agency in them because we not only understand where the starting point is for their financial health, but what systems need to be a desk to help to drive that? I think one of the other reports that came out from the Edison Alliance and the World Economic Forum that had another set of principles, which are also really, really great compliments. But one of them really called out the way that technology when it was designed and deployed right, accelerated financial inclusion during the pandemic, and that a lot of the ways that that happened was because of private sector innovation, because of public-private partnerships that were the basis of next generation infrastructure for financial inclusion, not just in individual products and services, but in safety nets and countries. So there was a whole lot of ways that public-private partnerships have helped move the ball forward. There's more work to do there. And again, you are already leading some of that work with your CEO partnership. I wonder if you could just reflect for a minute. If we need to work across sectors even more to move the inclusion conversation toward real deepening of financial well-being for people, what additional ways do you think that leaders need to work across sectors with each other? Yeah, first of all, I want to say that I love all the CEOs that are working in my CEO partnership, because they are CEOs that really want to make a change. And they really feel very strongly about this. And when we speak together, we're all extremely excited and committed and very sure it's going to come by. But when you actually go to the last mile in a country like Pakistan or India, or it becomes quite complicated because we've actually figured out a couple of things. First of all, that not one company can do it by itself. It's very difficult. There is what is actually making us not really including anybody as a cost of actually going the last mile. It's sometimes the perceived risks. It's a lack of infrastructure that is actually there. Sometimes in connectivity, roads, et cetera. So it is extremely expensive or very risky for companies to go by themselves. And that's why this issue that you were just talking about, the public private partnerships, the public has to do, have this digital public goods and these public goods in general, so the companies can go out there and sell the clients with something that actually changed their lives. And so this is an important thing. And that's why the Edison principles talk very well about sort of interoperable payments. But I always talk about everybody having an ID, having connectivity, some digital literacy, some financial literacy. These are things that are prerequisites for us to be able to deliver good products. And then the other one is maybe I am the telecom company reaching to the mom and pop shop, the little merchant, but I don't sell them any goods just other than data. But this other one that is selling goods is actually also in the silo, having this other relationship with the mom and pop goods. And then there's another bank that's actually had this other siloed relationship and none of these relationships are actually as good as they could be. So the whole idea is to actually get together and be able to serve that person because the mobile bank, the mobile money operator knows how much he's actually dealing because of this transactional data. With that I can actually give him insurance by which, you know, he will not actually have enormous risks whenever something big happens as a shock. And at the same time, if you actually have a consumer goods company that is actually selling them, well, we can actually improve that service as well. So that's the whole idea behind it. Now, some lessons learned is that not only the CEOs need to be very committed to this plan, but also the whole companies to be committed to this plan and above all, the local CEO and the local management. Because if we don't have that and they don't have the right KPIs for them, you know, that they will actually be able to tell the board, you know, I did very well in this country because I needed to digitize all the mom and pop stores. It will not happen because they will need to have the commitment themselves. The other thing is to actually have dedicated funds and stuff to also do the market research, you know, because it would be, it will mean actually thinking outside of your box, you know. It's if I'm selling shampoo sachets from Unilever and all of a sudden I'm talking about financial services, you know, the person having that relationship with a mom and pop shop, he will have to think in a completely different way. So it means actually start looking into other types of products that I will be convenient to the clients. I think that's one thing that we've actually learned is commitment across the whole company and you have to have KPIs that actually will follow this up and you have to have dedicated staff or resources to make it really work. And it's actually a question of, you know, investing. We've had a wonderful story. I think that you've actually heard from his master card, Unilever, AXA and a local bank. And what we did is basically a lot of these mom and pop stores could actually have much more access to inventory credits because of the cooperation between the three companies. And these were just as thrived and all the AXA and Mastercard and the local bank and Unilever actually saw the business grow. That's the other thing. This is not CSR. It should be a business because if we don't make it a business, it's not sustainable. So and that is the one lesson learned that we knew already was at a COP, but now we have to really get it sort of, you know, across the company as a whole. But certainly in the pandemic, I think it's a very good lessons learned. You know, I think that right now I don't need to say that financial inclusion is an important thing. You know, 10 years ago, I really had to sort of advocate for it. But nowadays, you know, we spoke so many countries, you know, things were going very well now the pandemic. All of a sudden, a lot of countries call us up, you know, how do we do this? We need to do this very quickly. And all of a sudden, all these barriers that seemed unsurmountable before, you know, became very easy to overcome. And also we're having all this fantastic social safety nets being paid to women when the whole pandemic started. So it is doable. We just need to have the commitment and the energy and the strength to do it because we know how to. So it's a question of really commitment and really want to be more creative to jump across the lines between public and private and between private sectors as a whole. I love the way that you have just layered on almost an entirely new addition to the agenda for financial inclusion. And I think that there's a growing set of leaders who are listening and wanting to think about more that they can do in this space. When you think ahead, five years, do you think that there is a particular headline or success that you'd love to be able to say next time you come and join us at a Global Inclusive Growth Summit? No, well, I still dream that, for example, all individuals will actually have one place where all the financial data is in one place so that he or she can actually try new products and see is it gonna improve my life or not? Right now, sometimes financial lives of people are just so disaggregated between a car that I bought an installment, say a house that I bought with this bank and another credit card here. So it is, we've made actually sometimes the financial lives of people so complicated. So simplifying and aggregating them will be my biggest dream. So it can really, the financial service providers could actually sort of try to pitch, listen, I have a product, but then you can really choose because right now, choose is extremely complicated for most of the people. Yeah, well, I love that vision. I think there's a lot of others who will be nodding their heads and participating in this summit that are on board with that vision. And I'll leave you with the final word. Yes, well, if you're not a service provider company, you still have employees. And also we know that a lot of employees, even if you pay about the minimum wage, they're also suffering with financial health issues. Please look at that. And we have had developed a whole set of measures and things that you could actually do to actually take care of employees properly. So it's not only the financial service providers, also normal companies can actually look after their employees. And we hope to be able to do that for SMEs in the future. Thank you so much. Thank you. Have a good day.