 We're here at GSR 16 in Shamashake in Egypt and I'm very pleased to be joined by Mr Alfred Hanig, who is Executive Director for the Alliance of Financial Inclusion. Mr Hanig, thank you very much and deepening with us today. You're welcome. I'd like to start off by talking about GSR. GSR, if for the first time is reaching out to the financial sector, how important is digital financial inclusion in today's world? Well, first of all, let me perhaps appreciate the ITU's effort to bring telecommunication regulators and financial regulators together. We believe it is very timely because digital financial inclusion is extremely important in the world of today. Just to give you an example, I mean we are all aware that we have two billion people who are unbanked in the world without any access to financial services and in the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, this is the organization I'm working for. We are doing a lot of capacity building, peer learning, training activities, in fact, to drive financial inclusion through smart policy and regulations and 70 percent of our work among the 94 countries who are our members are actually indirectly or directly focused on digital financial inclusion. I think this shows how important digital financial inclusion is, especially in countries where you don't have a physical infrastructure, no brick-and-mortar banking system, but of course the only way to reach out to poor people is technology. And how can e-applications such as e-banking and e-payments empower people? Well, the empowerment is huge. The question here, I think we have to ask ourselves, what are the benefits for a poor person in terms of getting access even to the most simple payment service? So this advantage, this benefit is huge because in many cases the poor person who is perhaps running a small shop or doing some activities in the field with access to a digital service he doesn't have to give up the job, he doesn't have to travel, there's no threat to be robbed and lose the cash, you don't have to queue up in front of a bank. In fact, you save a lot of transaction cost, you can follow your regular job and that makes a huge difference instead of just going somewhere and waiting. And in your experience, how can digital inclusion help achieve the 2030 agenda for sustainable development? Now as you are aware in the sustainable development goal approach, financial inclusion is seen as an enabler actually to achieve poverty eradication and as a facilitator of economic growth. So financial inclusion is extremely important in the realization of the sustainable development goals. However, what has also been stipulated by the UN when these objectives were put together is that a lot of the knowledge to make that happen is actually situated in the global south. So it is not so much the gap of knowledge, it is more the mechanism to share. That is why the UN have actually advocated for a peer learning process that will actually enable regulators from all over the world to learn from each other and to replicate what has already worked in other places. Now the Global Symposium for Regulators is an annual event which brings together participants from all different sectors. I wanted to ask you on the first day of this event, what has been your impressions of it? I was very impressed by the quality of the discussions, I must say, because we usually participate in discussions among financial regulators. So this is for me not the first time, but I think the first time when I participate in such a systematic discussion. I must say the discussions that I have heard today are not very different from what we usually discuss in discussions with financial regulators only. So it seems that there is a reason why both sides are striving for kind of collaboration and convergence. So are you optimistic for the future? Well, I'm very optimistic, otherwise we wouldn't be here. But I also told the participants today that it is extremely important to keep the momentum, to keep the passion and to go the extra mile. Because this is not a routine work, this comes on top of everything else. And of course, you would like to encourage everyone to continue this course. Mr. Alfred Hanig, thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much.