 Perfect. So that means we get started, yeah? When I say yes, we get started. We are already recording. So if you allow me, just a few words presentation for you. We have Mr. Alexander Malaketz from Toronto, Canada. And it's my great pleasure to launch the new year 2022 with him. It's an honor for me to have him here. And we're going to start with the topic that I feel very close to myself and to my interest, which is ESG and sustainability. So, Alexander, I leave it down to you directly to get the speech started, to show the slides. It's up to you. And thanks for accepting my invitation. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it. It's a great pleasure to be here with you and everybody who's been able to join us. Subra, thank you for joining as well. Ladies and gentlemen, as I said, it's a pleasure and a privilege here. I'm delighted to join you all for this conversation. My colleague Andrea ESG has become an area that I'm not only hugely interested in over the last number of years in particular, but actually we have a new firm that we've established out of London with three other partners where we do ESG related and sustainability related advisory work. So it's become part of the daily reality is what I'm getting at here. I've been in the international trade space probably for going on to 30 years and most of that in a consulting capacity with some significant focus on the trade finance side of the equation, including the last whatever it is now 22 years as a private consultant and doing a decent amount of industry advocacy work with a number of industry bodies. So hopefully, you know the three, well two of the three topics that we're going to be touching on over the next hour, which is the whole trade and supply chain the finance and ESG space all of those I should be able to speak to with some reasonable, let's say, awareness of what's going on on the DLT and hyper ledger side I'm going to ask Andrea to help me out at the end of the session so that he and I can sort of play tennis a little bit back and forth with that element of the discussion. So in that context, allow me to then just introduce the talk which is to say that we agreed on the rena that we would try to connect the dots between trade supply chains ELT or ESG, ESG, pardon me, and DLT. We'll take that as the overarching approach. And what I thought I would do today is to say to you that that I'll share with you the conclusion of the pocket the beginning so that we all know where we're going. So from my perspective, trade, trade related financing which for me is the traditional trade finance plus supply chain finance components together with sustainability and ESG are inextricably inextricably linked they're completely connected. And what I'm finding is that the linkages are getting more and more serious and more and more significant. I do believe that the enabling underlying architectures and technologies will be critical. And the question I have in my mind is how central a role will blockchain play in that role and in that architecture and then we can talk specifically about hyper ledger and where that fits into the equation as well. And I know this is a very advanced audience so I won't spend a lot of time on the contextual pieces, but just to try to frame things maybe with a slightly different lens, I just want to share with you a couple of observations on where we are with international trade. And those of you that are in the trade finance space know this quite well. Maybe a bit less but the World Trade Organization and other entities will say to you that 80% of global trade flows particularly merchandise trade flows depend on some form of trade financing. And that includes both the financing, you know, in the strict definition but also the risk mitigation piece of what trade finance does. So, you know, we're looking at 20 to 25 trillion in trade if you include services, and 80% of that again somehow depends on some kind of trade financing capability. We know that trade growth historically outpaced low GDP growth until the global financial crisis of 2008 and then it kind of reversed. We had seen trends pre COVID of the trade growth and the export growth in particular taking its place again as an engine of economic growth. Now we're seeing obviously some adverse impacts from COVID as well on this level, including on impacting SME suppliers and global supply chains. So, I'll recognize up front and as we should that international trade is imperfect so there are issues about, you know, equitable distribution of wealth there are issues about reaching SMEs and micro enterprises and emerging and developing markets. There are certainly concerns and issues about the carbon footprint of trade particularly the shipping industry. There are a whole slew of geopolitical concerns around how trade works and how the architecture for trade is built today including some challenges of the WTO in terms of equitable representation, and all those sorts of things but even with all those imperfections we have to acknowledge that trade has been extremely valuable to the human experience it's, you know, pulled pre COVID 400 million people above the poverty line. It's a significant, you know, economic value and growth and potential and improved standards of living around the world so just that backdrop, I think, is the point is to set the stage for me about how important a role trade plays in our collective experience. And particularly we saw this in a couple of jurisdictions over the last few years some still see trade as a zero sum you win and I lose game others, you know, see it as a geopolitical and or other weapon, which I believe is extremely not only self serving but also not sustainable if I feel permit me that turn of phrase. And actually, I'm from the camp that believes that when we trade we all do better. The trade contributes to international security in addition to all the economic benefits. And so when we think about trade we should be thinking about it strategically and thinking about it holistically in terms of the global community so that's my, that's my sort of soft side coming generally, genuinely believe that trade has the potential to do tremendous good has done, and if we manage it carefully and thoughtfully we can continue to do that. The geopolitics of trade are extremely critical as we saw, and we're seeing it now with the US China and a number of other sort of dynamics. And we're, you know, there's a lot of discussion about reshoring and an on shoring and French shoring now this is in return I've seen recently. And I also want to point out that the economics are the economics so as much as it may be attractive from a political perspective to talk about certain things. There are economic practicalities there are economic realities and as a respective colleague said on a panel last year sometime, it's not that easy to reshor a semiconductor plan, you know, billion dollar operation just because you decide you feel like it or because you need to pander to local political priorities. There are realities to think about and I really like the distinction of saying it's not the globalization but it's real globalization and I credit that remark to Bob Coopman who's the chief economist at the WTO who joined us on a panel last year and made the case very compellingly for me that that in fact is what we're looking so all that to say that trade is critical on a number of levels. And, you know, we're looking at from a financing perspective techniques that are very, very well established on the classical trade side, and certainly growing very quickly on the supply chain side and particularly Pables finance structures and techniques. So there's a real sort of growth dimension or tendency in the trade space when you look at it long term, including on the financing side and we'll see that the same is true now in the ESG sustainability space as well. I would put to you this notion of integrative trade, which I know was written about very significantly by the former governor of the Bank of Canada who also was the chief executive of our National Export Credit Agency, Stephen Polos. Stephen has written extensively about this notion of integrative trade that links international trade and supply chains to things like form direct investment flows. So the point here is to say that when we talk about trade we're not talking about trade in isolation, but we're talking about it in a broader context which includes, you know, trillions in form direct investment flows that are linked to trade activity, and vice versa. So you can either establish an operation and you trade or you trade and then you establish an operation that means to to investment flows, and that also ties into the unsure like on shoring reshoring conversation. So, so all of those things linked to supply chain structures, which is also a very timely topic with cove it and when the geopolitics that we're looking at today. Now, just again to highlight how difficult or complex the supply chains can be particularly when you look at them in that wider context, you can imagine, you know, a large buyer at one end of the supply chain with multiple thousands of suppliers around the globe and you can imagine just graphically how complicated the transaction flows are on the fiscal supply chain, as well as on the financial supply chain and now increasingly in what we call the data supply chain as well. And that's where the technical architecture discussion can become very relevant and that's also where we can tie in some very significant ESG and sustainability observations so just to keep in mind physical financial and data supply chain as we go through this discussion as well. A couple of quick, let's say highlights of things that are happening in the trade world so we're all very conscious of 3d printing and additive manufacturing and the impact that that will have over the coming decades. And when you find that General Electric is 3d printing components of aircraft engines it starts to become really interesting and when you find that, you know, there are people talking about people like Kate Raworth in the UK talking about economics and saying economics needs to be looked at in a completely different context with things like what's the upper limit of what we can do given that we live on earth and the earth itself has its constraints. And so, you know, what can we do, where are the limits, where does it start to get dangerous and then the whole sustainability conversation comes into this as well. We also post COVID have put a lot of attention on the digitization discussion which by some estimates has been accelerated by at least five years certainly in trade finance and now we're seeing more and more momentum in trade digitization as well and we've had some really good progress in part thanks to Chris Southworth at ICC UK with Militia and the pickup in digitizing trade finance documentation and related activities so we're seeing some really good progress there on things that we, you know, a couple of years ago we would have said we're nearly impossible something we're figuring out how to get them done so there's some really positive developments there. And certainly we're seeing a pickup as well in terms of online trading platforms and it happens I put eBay on this slide it could have been Ali Baba and a number of others at sea or whatever. But we're certainly seeing some significant developments and evolutions and critical masses of volume in those contexts as well. And then, finally, on this slide just to note the work of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainable Leadership sustainability leadership at the University of Cambridge and a lot of the interesting things they're doing in trade, including trade finance and sustainability there's a real, as I said, interlinkage between the three topics and the tech that we're exploring today. Just very quickly, it seemed was interesting to note that Walmart is thinking about these blimp like flowing warehouses. So you can imagine those things being deployed in a number of places and then having drones deliver from one blimp warehouse to another or maybe to the end client. So all that again to say that there are some very interesting changes coming on the physical supply chain side of things. On financing, you know we talked about the 80% figure and we know that that's, you know, 16 to $20 trillion of trade that's that's being financed in some way. In the pre 2008, I think it's fair to say that very relatively few beyond core practitioners really knew the role of trade finance. And then Pascal Lamine the WTO and our good friend Marco boy at the WTO really worked to bring into focus the role of trade finance in supporting international trade flows, and Steven Beck at the Asian Development Bank and others also drove that conversation very significantly back then through collecting data and through doing analytics and through creating a robust, let's say reports and an academically solid sort of pieces of analysis that have really brought into focus the role of in the support of international trade. We know the challenges that SMEs face and accessing finance including trade finance and that is a perennial challenge, although again we're seeing some focus there. The COVID crisis has complicated the finance challenge now we have a global trade finance gap that's gone from 1.5 trillion to 1.7 trillion according to the ADB's latest analysis. And we know that there are some real challenges in terms of being able to fill that gap using traditional mechanisms and traditional providers of trade finance and if I can put it more bluntly. We know that the banks who are the core providers certainly of traditional trade finance will never fill that gap. They just simply don't have balance sheet capacity they don't have risk tolerance they have, you know, a lot of local adequacy constraints that are limiting their ability to address this so there's a real drive to try to sort out how we might be able to fill that gap so that we can drive additional trade and then drive additional economic value creation. So in terms of what trade finance is again this is a sophisticated audience but I wanted to share with you my framework for this and I've used it. You know, probably for the last 15 years or so and it's enough I've included it in my book on the topic and so far it has stood the test of time, and it hasn't been broken down. And so what I'll say is trade finance no matter how complicated it is is some combination of one of one or more four factors and that is secure and timely payment across borders, some form of financing or lending, some form of risk mitigation, and then finally, some related data or information flow and it doesn't matter how complicated the deal is, how complex the structure is, what markets you're dealing with. You will find some combination of those four or subset of them in any trade financing dealing therefore you can understand the deal based on those those four dimensions and obviously you know when you're dealing with, say, a relatively high risk market or a new trading market, maybe the risk mitigation piece becomes more critical, and the payment pieces may be a second secondary priority, whatever. So those things will sort of rise and fall depending on the circumstances or particular deal, but that's the framework that that is helpful to me and understanding what this business is about. In terms of the digitization piece, everybody is familiar notionally with the paper flows, but this graphic that was created by Boston Consulting Group in 2018 has been extremely useful to me to get a visual of this. So 35 to 45 pages of documentation per trade deal, 600 million documents per year, you know, 400 to 600 data fields per transaction, and 4000 to 6000 data field interactions which is about 200 billion per year. And yet we know that there's a huge amount of duplication in all of this. So, when we talk about the potential for trade finance to be digitized, it's partly addressing this problem and really getting to the core of the really valuable data that's in this activity. And in fact just quickly to mention, in the anti money laundering financial crimes compliance AML CFT space, and we are doing some work with ADB on on this kind of thing and how we could better leverage the data in these transactions to enhance investigations intelligence gathering and prosecutions around AML activity, as well as the underlying product crimes so there are a number of applications to these technical revolutions. So just quickly on supply chain finance as I mentioned, that's where the growth is in our business, I mean traditional trade mechanisms have been trending flat to downward for at least the last, I don't know 1015 years if not longer. And industry data shows that year on year. And so we know that the growth is in these supply chain finance techniques. In 2016 we published with four industry associations, five, pardon me, partnering partnering on this these sort of standard definitions which I commend to you if you've not seen them. But that's where the growth is in terms of how financing gets done from a trade perspective. Now just to get to the ESG discussion relatively soon but I want to spend a bit more time on this piece because I think that's the new element of this perhaps for this group. And it's to say that I want to put ESG in in a historical arc for you. So if you go back maybe 30 years or so when the environmental movement started. This was for me the beginning of the kind of thinking that led us to where we are today in terms of ESG so when Greenpeace was, you know, storming ships at sea and people were considered to be on the fringe if they were talking about environmental issues. And we're at a point now where the environment as you've seen from Cup 26 and other things happening around us is very much at the heart of the discussions that we undertake even in corporate board rooms. In ESG space when you have Larry Fink at BlackRock who is, you know, manages the biggest, one of the biggest if not the biggest investment funds on the planet and championing ESG and championing sustainability, you've got to appreciate how much those fringe and I put that in the presentation marks conversations have come into the into the heart of discussions policy discussions commercial discussions and other similar conversations. So, going from that environmental movement of 30 years ago we then progressed I guess to corporate social responsibility. From my perspective and the perspective of my partners in London at ESG validation. Our view is that CSR in a sense devolved because it became a bit of a public relations exercise it became a process by which companies engaged in, you know, charitable works and and so that type and largely in our view again I'm qualifying this did this as a public relations exercise and so think integrity of CSR. And it was damaged by that by that reality and that experience and so it's one of the things that we're watching very carefully ESG and with, you know, so called greenwashing and so called virtually virtue signaling activities to make sure that that doesn't overtake the fundamentally correct path that ESG is taking us on. If we put this again in context you have the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the 17 of them with their multiple sub goals. They are an outgrowth of the millennium develop development goals and it's this attempt to bring together a group of stakeholders to say what are the big problems we need to solve for the survival of humanity in the planet and for actually better than actually proper evolution and having a decent quality of life for the planet and for everything that inhabits it. So the SDGs are very, very far reaching as you can see and they're very ambitious in terms of how far they reach in defining the sub goals and activities that we hope to accomplish underneath that SDGs umbrella. Maybe the whole discussion of stakeholder capitalism and the triple bottom line has picked up momentum so this is a whole question of what's the purpose of a corporation or a business is it really all about the Milton Friedman profit maximization discussion or is there something larger than that and you know it's coming into this whole discussion of does a business have a social license to operate and and if it doesn't what does that mean. So should it be conscious of the social license to operate and should it then have a responsibility that ties back to that and I think the answer is yes on both points but I think there are still some debates about how far along what we've come and how far we're likely to travel down that path. There are still those arguing that actually profit maximization remains the primary motivation and actually the rest of it is is a bit fanciful and not not at all realistic, when you keep in mind that Bloomberg is predicting $53 trillion in assets under management that will be ESG aligned by 2025 which is now only three years away. That represents about 33% of global assets under management by various investment funds and asset managers so you can see that there's at least the potential for a huge ESG aligned activity in the capital markets. So that's going to drive a lot of other activities as it is or as it is already doing. So this whole evolution or this arc of history around ESG, I think is is when you connect those dots this way. Hopefully, it becomes clear that actually is part of a longer term progression. And it's not something that suddenly popped up out of the blue and it's not some theoretical exercise that people have come up with. It actually on the NGO side or on the academic side it actually ties very directly to the broader evolution of human society of business of trade. And we can we can we can trace that that arc of history back at least 34 years if not before that. And I think that when you track the space and you find that boards and C-suite executives are taking very much to heart their obligations in ESG space and sustainability space. It's no longer an option to have that conversation. It's actually an urgent requirement and I think people are becoming more and more conscious of that reality. It is however a nascent space now the 53 trillion that I mentioned a minute ago I mean if you pick up you run a Google search which I did just before this presentation and do an image search on ESG investment investments or ESG funds. This is basically where you find as you find a group of these kind of graphs from multiple sources and they're all hugely trending upwards in terms of ESG or sustainability aligned investment activity. And that's going to translate in fact in fact has at the broader economic level as well. Now, this is when I say it's a nascent space, you know I go back to the work that we did in the supply chain finance area in 20 whatever it was 2014 to 2016, where we didn't even speak the same language on supply chain finance as an industry and I argue we still don't still have work to do to get to consistent language and definitions. But ESG is is even, you know, earlier in its journey on us, there are debates now whether we should be talking about environmental social and governance issues ESG or whether we should be flipping it and saying actually it's governance and social issues because if you get the governance governance right and the rest should flow properly now, you know, define what right proper governance looks like and then you get into another discussion but those who argue GS are saying if you get the governance right at the policy level at the C-suite level, then the rest should flow naturally. Now, that assumes that the governance thinking has evolved beyond the pure profit maximization motivation which it hasn't in all places so you know there's some debate there. Then the question starts about is it really ESG or ES and G3 specific or distinct pillars within within this construct and then the question becomes with climate change, you know the priority on an environment is understandable but if you, if you fix the environment and you don't fix the social inequities, then you still risk some kind of, let's say instability, and if I use sort of extreme language revolution of some type or other because of the inequity. Can you disregard the governance piece and focus on the other two. So there's a real question about whether you break it up into components or not whether that makes sense or whether you have to take a holistic approach. Then recently receiving a suggestion that actually ESG isn't even enough so we need ESG and then we need another E to deal with the economics because we need to deal with the reality of the economic impact of the ESG considerations and we need to deal with the reality of what are the economic opportunities that come with the whole ESG construct so when I say it's a nascent space I mean even on basic definitions we haven't yet agreed and probably one for some time, but one thing is sure it's undeniably in a growth mode. Now just to give you a sense of the scope this is from the sustainability accounting standards board which now I think doesn't exist anymore post post cop 26 it's been it's been integrated with another entity. But but the SAS bees and materiality map gives you a good sense of all of the sorts of things that are involved in certainly talk about the for the environment. There's a lot of talk about carbon emissions, but there are a whole range of other issues under that including somewhere in there I think there should have been biodiversity because if you interesting enough. If you look at the World Economic Forum risk risk map biodiversity likely risk and the highest adverse impact risk. So it's the biggest single risk that the web identifies in the risk map is biodiversity law. So there are some real discussions about how to manage the whole climate and environmental discussion, but not the site of other related issues that might be even more imminent and more urgent including things like biodiversity loss. On the governance side look at me you can see things anything ranging from ethical behavior to competitiveness to legal and regulatory issues. And critical incident risk management certainly that's something that COVID is brought sharply into into focus for us over the last two years and then some. And then there's a whole range of other things social capital issues around human rights, data security and privacy, product safety, customer or consumer welfare so this is just to give you a sense of all those sorts of things that could be covered under any discussion. Labor practices obviously labor safety, you know child labor we think about that a lot in the context of trade and supply chains or at least we should. And then, and then beyond that, I can also highlight the sorts of things that that tie into some very significant risks right so if we look at the whole 1.5 degree conversation that came out of or that that fed into 2026 and actually has been part of the conversation for some time. The practical real I mean this is life and death right. If we get past a certain point of temperature on the earth. And last year apparently was the hottest year temperature wise on record. In the history of our experience. If we get past a certain point. Anything on earth becomes uninsurable. So imagine the implications of that for you whether it's your home whether it's your businesses whether it's, you know, your business partners anything that you can imagine where you're trying to mitigate some form of risk. The insurance companies and their partners simply will not be able to do it we've already seen huge payouts related to climate disasters and things like this over the last number of years and that's become a very significant topic of discussion insurance circles. So just imagine if you get to a point where absolutely nothing is insurable, and the implications of that are just mind boggling. I mentioned the whole business of biodiversity loss. So it's really climate plus biodiversity we have some really significant challenges dealing there. And, and you know some of the initiatives that are being undertaken here are helpful and important but it just feels like we're not doing enough. I don't see any of you on screen but I'm going to ask a rhetorical question and I'll assume that your hands will all be up so and I'm putting mine up here so how many of you buy clothing. How many of you buy food. And how many of you own a smartphone. I'm going to assume it's yes for all of you. And one of the stunning things that I learned recently and you can tell by the gray hair here. If I were smart I would be talking about early retirement and golfing but but I'm not so for that reason I'm back in school. One of the things I'm studying is a certificate course in ESG and in the context of this very very good course with a guest speaker who works in the area of human slavery and human trafficking. From ES to the three questions that I asked you. You are very personally and very directly tied to somewhere between 38 and 40 cases of human slavery in your personal supply chain. So, when I heard that data point and the gentleman who spoke to us as an expert in the field and he said I can't get my number below 38. That's how ingrained human trafficking and slavery is in our international supply chain. I leave that with you to think about the fact that we're not this is not a theoretical conversation when we talk about ESG. We talk about sustainability we talk about a human impact of these things. It's very very serious business. And so this is one data point hopefully that will bring that bring that point home for you. Now, in terms of the sustainable development goals and the ESG piece. If you're a business or if you're running a business, and you get it wrong. There's a huge reputational risk, and increasingly your clients your investors and your other stakeholders want you to get this right. And if you don't, you'll pay for it. So, there was a significant case in London. I want to say a year and a half two years ago, where this company had a very very high rating from one of the ESG ratings entities or agencies in fact I think it got their top rating. And then within a number of weeks, it was found that one of their production facilities, about 60 months outside of London so we're not talking about some corner of the world here. That facility was using dentury labor to produce the goods that this company was selling and so you know there's there's a real risk if you don't get this right. But there's also a significant opportunity so there are those who look at the 17 SDGs and say actually this is the biggest roadmap to opportunity that we've ever seen because for companies and businesses and organizations that solve these problems. The upside is tremendous. And so we look at it from a trade and supply chain perspective. To address the sustainable development goal objectives through your supply chains and through trade activity. The upside is, it's huge. I mean when they, when there was a business roundtable attempt to calculate the financing of the SDGs region. This is going back a number of years now. It was estimated to be a three to $5 trillion challenge to finance the SDGs holistically get them all done and delivered. The positive element of that was the ROI was estimated to be 300% free to get it right. So, and that was a very sort of initial rough estimate, but the upside is very significant. Now, we mentioned that we are still looking at definitions and discussions were even even more broadly than just ESG. Even some of the language that we use in this context means definition right, are we talking about a carbon tax or a carbon price and I really don't like the carbon tax expression because it's a political expression. It is meant to stir up opposition or to create controversy when in fact what we're saying is that carbon needs to be priced into the production of goods needs to take externalities as we say in economics, and actually price them into the production of the goods that are created so that you're actually reflecting the appropriate cost of resources, and then creating appropriate value related to that production so it's, it's a pricing exercise, not a taxing exercise or taxation exercise in my view, and I'm happy to have that discussion. Then the other piece that we talk a lot about is how do we deal with this and let's think about carbon emissions here for a minute. There's a difference in the situation between a developed economy, and I'll, you know, I want to point to anybody in particular any one of them versus an emerging or developing economy and the developing economy years will say look, you guys have been doing this for the last 200 or 300 years since the industrial revolution and before that, and you got us here, and now you're going to tell us that we can't and that's problematic because carbon emissions for us are part of a growth and development process and it's very difficult for us not to do that. It's not like we can go out and buy solar panels tomorrow the way you guys can do it. So, there's a huge disconnect between expectations and realities on the ground and actually, if you're in discussions with emerging market leaders and developing market leaders they will tell you, in some parts of the world burning coal is a matter of life and death. It's the only source of heat and energy that's available or economically available. It's not a matter of, you know, we have a choice and we're just making the wrong choice. It's, it's, it's something that where there isn't really optionality and by the way, you know, I don't have the data point on this but I suspect if you eliminated all of the carbon emissions of the continent of Africa, it would be a drop in the bucket, compared to if you solve the US or China or one of the other sort of large economy emissions problem so there's also this kind of inequity in the whole conversation so for that reason, this notion of a just transition, meaning an equitable and correct transition comes into ESG discussion. And so it should. I just want to highlight again that I'm conscious that we're coming up on time so we'll wrap it up shortly but I want to highlight again in the context of trade and supply chains that with multiple 10,000 or 20,000 suppliers whatever, and think about the ESG and sustainability discussion in the context of this kind of supply chain that reaches from, say, you know, Europe all the way through to Africa or South Asia and all of the circumstances of each company and business and community across that supply chain. Even with that, what's very clear is that investors and consumers and other stakeholders and now increasingly regulatory authorities are demanding ESG alignment and ESG aligned behavior from supply chains and particularly large buyers at the end of supply chain. So when a large buyer faces that kind of demand, they will naturally drive that requirement down into their supply chains which will drag SMEs and micro enterprises into the ESG discussion whether they want to be there or not. And so my, my partners and I were in discussions with a firm in UK on this topic to say, how do we make ESG not only relevant for SMEs but also, let's say affordable and actionable. And we all know SMEs they're living, you know, from one invoice to another their cash poor and resource poor and they're basically often in survival mode and when you come to them and say look you got to be thinking about sustainability. They very often say well I'd love to but I have to pay my bills right after me my payroll or have to pay my utilities or whatever so it's a, it's an urgency question. But the minute their buyer says thou shalt, then suddenly it becomes part of that survival equation and that is what we're seeing happen. And so ESG will be driven down into the SME supplier community. And we're actually seeing that now so part of the connecting the dots discussion today is to highlight to realize that supply chain transparency is one of the things that is being increasingly demanded, partly in the ESG context but now certainly in the COVID context as well. And then related to that the whole traceability so if you want and we tried this, maybe 10 or 12 years ago with with Cambridge, in terms of a poem one. So the discussion with BAFTA bankers Association for fans and trade and this was general someone was a Barclays was driving us was can we demonstrate palm oil in Indonesia was sustainably sourced, and that it's the same poem initially that's gone through the supply chain and made it to the end point and if we can show that and if we can certify that can the financiers come in and offer some kind of incentive for that sustainable source of behavior so that kind of thinking isn't new. But we're still very much working on it and developing and involving it. So the traceability piece ties in very much with the transparency piece now. So what coven is brought into focus for us is the resiliency question and resiliency is a matter of how well and how quickly does a supply chain respond to unexpected shocks. And so that's the other piece that we're observing now, and actually interestingly enough, at least anecdotally and there's some data starting to come up on this that companies and businesses that were socially conscious and more ESG aligned and more structured and running more sustainably were found to be actually much more resilient to the coven crisis, because they were able to pivot because they were able to respond appropriately. More quickly than others that were not that were driven purely by by profit maximization bottom line so those companies that reacted to coven by pushing costs into their supply chain or trying to delay payment to their suppliers or otherwise making it somebody a problem, have done far worse than those companies who looked at their businesses and their communities holistically and said okay how do we come together to address this crisis and and how do we come out of it in a in a healthier stronger way. So the solely ESG discussion again in mid crisis has proven to be very very practical and important. Clearly, those that are running ESG and sustainability as a tick box or as a PR exercise or on the loser side of ledger. Again, as I mentioned those that are doing to go it alone I'll survive and you die and it's not my problem. And those that see them winning in a supply chain means their supplier losing again, you know wrong side of ledger. And those that really embrace ESG and demonstrate a commitment and actually can can can prove that the commitment has been met or that they're taking legitimate measures to do that. Those that are looking at a balance between commercial and sustainable and actually don't see them as being opposing forces. And those that look at this from ecosystem and community perspective are doing much better than than their counterparts. So from an investment perspective, I've been in discussions with with asset managers and then pension fund managers who said to me look my job, my mandate, my fiduciary obligations to maximize returns for my pension plan or whatever investment fund they're managing. So if I have to go and invest in a simple portfolio, you know, munitions, you know cigarettes or whatever. And it's not ESG line and it's not sustainable. Oh well to that. That's that's my, that's my responsibility and that's how I execute it. So I think we're going to find that that argument is going to hold less and less credibility and less and less water as we go, and then find again on the traceability question, there's a very clear poll to traceability and a very clear growing opposition to opaque scenarios and supply chains. We talked briefly about supplied about trade finance and the fact that we don't have capacity in traditional sources to meet the $1.7 trillion trade financing gap. We've been doing some work and again it's a multi year kind of effort and we're trying to kick it off again with with our friends at ITFA with Sean Edwards and and trust and group and the team to try to develop trade finance as an investable asset class. And part of my connecting the dots here is to say that trade finance actually because it finances real economy activity. And to the extent that we are advancing the just transition and sustainable sourcing and all those sorts of things that we talked about so far in the context of supply chains. It's going to become a very attractive ESG line investment opportunity. And so if we can connect the dots between trying to develop more capacity to finance trade, and making trade finance assets more ESG lined and more sustainable, you might be able to motivate more capital to come into the asset class and we know that at the moment, the global capital markets are flush with cash, people are looking for deals people looking for returns and they're looking for ESG attractive investment alternatives to suggest you that trade finance is one of those attractive alternatives if we can tell the story appropriately and create the circumstances in terms of the asset class being comparable and competitive to other alternatives. And one thing that's clear in ESG and sustainability space, including us to use is that, you know, a public capital meaning in government sources will not do alone. So that private capital must be mobilized in connection with it so get this so called blended capital dynamic at work and actually trade finance again because of miniature of what it finances can very attractive in that respect. A whole range of scale systems and tools for this around sustainability and ESG. So whether you look at the TCFD materiality framework whether you look at the International Trade Center standards map, or any number of other initiatives in the market today, those tools are available. The discussion around ESG has to be a serious one, this is taken from our ESG validation white paper that we published, I think it was early 2020. It's not it's not a luxury or distraction, it is a substantive important consideration. And the question is, you know, where do you want your company's reputation and performance to be when when when this gets looked at from a historical industry you want to be on. On the hyper ledger piece and then I had a brief discussion before I agreed to do this. Nice and look I'm not versed enough in hyper ledger in the specifics of hyper ledger so I'm going to suggest. If you don't mind that you pop yourself on screen and you know I can just chat about how we connect the dots here, because for me and I'll just say that I have a certain perspective on this in the past life I managed technology and communications and I work very closely with technical people. I'm not a developer and so I don't get fired up by the sexiest technology and you know that's good or bad I'm not not saying it's good about either way but that's where it is. I think for me as an enabler and a provider potential provider solutions and so I'd like to just post the question. As I did at the start of this. What how central the law of blockchain be in connecting these dots and then specifically on hyper ledger. You know, let's maybe have a chat and the reason I have by the way, a photo of Miami on this slide, I'll tell you it's not just to cheer everybody up. I'm recalling a conversation we had at an industry event a number of years ago as a panel that involved a group of blockchain and DLT specialists and a few people who may hear about this or see this on the recorded version won't be happy for me mentioning this but I'll do it anyway. This panel was about the potential of DLT. It goes back a few years as I said and from the back of the room I'm a senior member of the trade finance community put his hand up and said okay I heard what you said which you all said but I have one fundamental question and the fundamental question is why blockchain and the point he was making was actually it's a technical architecture and aren't there other technical architectures that achieve some similar things and the thing that was striking was that we didn't get a clear answer and so I remain sort of with this question of what's the new thing, what's the new capability or capacity that's brought to the table by blockchain and so I'm happy to have that exchange and conversation actually be educated as a result of it and so with that I think that would be the end of my remarks and I want to thank you all very much for your attention and for sticking with us through this hour and Alaya thank you very much again for the opportunity to come and join you and to share a few thoughts on joining the dots between trade trade finance and supply chains and all the SGE discussions thank you very much. Thank you Alexander it was very insightful and I really enjoyed your speech it was great by the way it was what I expected you to deliver and it went great absolutely. I said a few ways during your speech to start from my friend of Bonseborella. Still over there I would love to talk to the last question to you Alfonso are you still there? Here I am thank you thank you Alexander really I learned a lot. You're very kind thank you. It made my day and gave me a new direction thank you and thank you Andrea for the opportunity to talk to you. You're quite right in what you're asking Alexander quoting your friend from Miami which by the way wants to be the blockchain hub for Latin America. The new mayor is doing a lot of things to make that city a blockchain hub. The question is it is it is it the right architecture and we would like to think that DLT is but we don't know yet for complete certain with complete certainty that that is the case okay it helps to distribute responsibilities and in that sense networking did it before okay but it brings in this intermediation which on the other hand is what trade is all about okay both in the intermediaries that the times are needed and the peer-to-peer transactions that that we all wish for okay now but you made me think a lot when you you made me realize how much of my supply chain supports a slavery something I never thought before so if I could have traceability of that slavery and the things that I buy I would become a more conscious buyer so traceability is another of the of the areas that it could bring I think the blockchain architecture could be yeah yeah I think so look to be clear I'm not critiquing DLT I understand the potential for it I'm I'm contrasting it to say you know it may not be the only solution it's a good complementary solution or maybe it's a leading edge solution and maybe it involves it evolves to be the leading edge solution I guess the call I'm I'm proposing to this audience because you're all invested in the topic is that if there were a clear answer to the question why DLT it would be very very compelling to make that part of the story so to your point about Miami you know Panama I was in Singapore in November I'm a member of the Bloomberg economy trade trade council which is a tremendous privilege and we had an amazing event in November and you know it became very clear that ESG is very central to the trade conversation we had one of the ministers from Panama too I think were with us to talk about Panama and the onshore and reshoring discussion on how it could become a center of of sustainable trade and sustainable activity they're doing some great things in sustainable tourism so there are some really really promising developments in different parts of the world and I'm glad you're highlighted Miami and it's role in the DLT space you know my suggestion to this community is if you could take that why DLT question or why blockchain question and come up with a crisp response it would be very very powerful as part of your proposition to the wider wider world I agree I agree with you completely it's complementary and it's you said it very well by the way Alfonso when you say disintermediation this is what I thought about and wanted to share with you this thought I was massively exposed to small and micro companies all over the world in my times when the only trade funds in northern Africa and in South America but most of the tissue of the economic tissue is represented by those micro companies to grant them with technology that allows pure pure trade and trading uh it's sort of disintermediation and sustainable development you enable literally those micro uh companies to trade and not be strangled by the current system so to me to have this new technology is some kind of very beneficial although we're far from having the definitive let's say picture in hand but in the mid-long term this is something that could perfectly fit sustainable trade and trade funds yeah and I couldn't agree more with you so sir there are a number of interesting fin texts that are targeting now the SME space and the micro enterprise space in terms of financing and enabling them to engage in trade so one in particular I'm familiar with called countable with a K is an American company that does a lot of work across Africa and they are to the best of my knowledge a blockchain based architecture and they're targeting exactly the sorts of scenarios that you're describing now one of the other things I'm a member of something called the world trade board and we have published very recently a paper that tries to take a slightly different angle on the SME question so typically in every conversation I've ever been in on SMEs it's been a very patronizing discussion that says oh the poor SME they're having such a hard time they can't access finance they don't have resources they they don't know how to manage all of this stuff right the whole litany of list of things they can't do but we said look hang on a minute if anybody's ever run an SME you know that the people who who found and run small businesses are very tough they're very resilient they're very creative they survive all kinds of crises they negotiate their way through all kinds of things so why don't we change the conversation and talk about the SME as an empowered entity instead of as a victim in the conversation and so that's the gist of our paper which we're just we've just published it maybe a week or so ago and so we'll be starting to do some work and some advocacy around the SME as an empowered entity part of the conversation being technology how it enables the SME to engage how it reduces the cost of you know due diligence onboarding all the kinds of things that we know are problematic for traditional financiers to deal with SMEs but also that will help the emerging fintechs and alternative solutions so I think there's as much as we could have a you know evolving discussion on tech architecture we can have an evolving discussion on SMEs just like we had today an evolving discussion on supply chains and trade and what is involved in all of that and we can put all of that under a sustainability in ESG umbrella so I genuinely think that this is not an option I think the urgency is huge around ESG and sustainability and I think you'll see more and more drive from not only the capital markets but the regulatory authorities to make this central to our conversation and and if you're if you're on a border if you're in a C-suite and you're not talking any ESG or sustainability you are making a huge mistake and it's going to cost you. Well, Alexander, could I speak a bit? Of course, sir. Alexander, first of all I want to compliment you for the reality check that you brought to most of us like Alfonso said at a personal level about the kind of impact or a kind of non-ESG impact that we're having on our consumption today that's really really a wake up call for me for probably everybody else but I also want to compliment you for bringing out the complexity that BCG diagram that you've brought up is something which I've not seen for a while but actually it's a waking up call to a lot of people who are trying to solve the digitization thing but most of all the last part when you mentioned about to not look at SMEs as victims look at them as empathetic but I love that part right I really want to read the paper I've not looked for it but I will search for it after this call I'll read it but I'm happy to send your copy it's been it's I think it's been posted on LinkedIn but anyways I'm happy to share a copy I'll share it Andrea with you so if you want to distribute it to the group and I'll send you a copy as well so please do please do I will share it with the rest of the team also on the on the happy life to trade finance sake She just sort of finished what I was going to say not so much of a question given that we don't have a time um whether it is DLT or whatever technology but the most important part is helping this empowered SMEs to be able to get to the financing to do the job in a responsible way I believe that they are resilient and they actually want to do the right thing they are not just paying up the money like part of my statement some of those big corporates corporates are more greedy than SMEs SMEs are just making the ends meet they want to do the right thing and we have to fix that technology gap in getting the traceability to make sure that all the big financing institutions and small finance institutions can finance the sustainable produced sustainable trade in a sustainable way I think we all have a responsibility and with the kind of conversation that you have a speech you gave I'm sure we can do it together So bro thank you for that and let me pick up on two points and I'll start with your last point on the SMEs versus the large corporates it's interesting you say that I was I just saw the and I don't know his exact title but it's something like head of head of VSG or head of sustainability whatever oh no I'm sorry it's worse it's worse it's head of compliance and this guy was talking about a large company that got caught up in some very significant fraudulent activity and he said with a straight face which almost made me fall out of my chair he said corporations don't commit crimes people commit crimes now this organization you know it was it wasn't an isolated incident it was a systemic issue within the company and this guy instead of owning it and saying okay look we need to fix it we made some mistakes whatever it was right and he would he had been brought in from the outside to fix the problem instead of owning it he said oh no no corporations don't commit crimes it's like in there are few individuals in the shop that do that so so when you have those kinds of attitudes it perpetuates the sort of perception that you that you described on the DLT say on the pardon me on the BCG analysis it's amazing for those who've never been in a trade finance operations business and I have been in more years ago than I can care to count or or than I will admit publicly I remember speaking to one of the deputies at one of the probably top three trade processing banks in the world and he said oh yeah he said I always get these 20-some things knocking on my door saying I'm going to come in and fix your problem I'm going to digitize your entire business and he says the first thing I asked them is have you ever seen what a trade processing shop looks like and the kid will say no I've never been in I just I understand it theoretically I understand the paper flow all of this he said okay stop talking come with me and so he takes them to this like huge processing shop with like a thousand people sitting there moving paper and you know the guy who's the CEO of this fintech looks around and goes oh my god this is more complicated than I thought well all right now let's have a conversation so so again I take your point yeah it's it's it's it's worth it's a graphic that really brings to focus how complicated the the the realities are on the ground right Alexander sorry for interrupting you I think we've come to an end this the end of the speech I'm so sorry I would love to go on with this discussion over and over again it's topic that is central at the core of my whole interest and maybe we can we can expand our chat in the future I thank you so it was a real pleasure to have you today and hopefully we can expand our discussions in the future to see how DRPs and especially open source ones can feed ESG's the current and the future ESG scenario thank you so much Alexander for joining us today looking forward to talking to you again and have a great day you all come today we've got John forces again in two weeks time stay all safe and happy is talk soon again thank you all thank you everybody bye bye be safe bye bye so glad thank you so much thank you everybody thank you thank you Alexander great thank you