 It's a very special pleasure and honour for me to have been invited to join you at this 12th annual conference. Very few professional gatherings can make the scale of impact on our collective prosperity and national development as the Charter Institute of Bankers can. Indeed, your professional association would have been number one among professional associations, but for the fact that it is second only to the Nigerian Bar Association. I see that a few of my friends of the Nigerian Bar Association are defected into the banking profession and finding it difficult to agree one way or another. But quite seriously, we are at a crucial point in our economic history as a nation. After emerging from a recession, we have attained a reasonable measure of macroeconomic stability, positive growth for almost two years. We've also seen inflation falling sharply from close to 18% to about 11.02 today. While the challenges remain significant, our population is growing at about 3% per annum, and roughly 1.7 million young men and women are coming every year into the marketplace. We will have the third-largest population in the world in just under three decades from now. We all know what we need to do, no question at all. Every one of us knows what we need to do. We must create good jobs and opportunities. We must rapidly industrialize. We must provide the environment for local businesses, small and large, to create wealth and value. We must also address the concerns of young entrepreneurs and startups and the small traders, the millions at the bottom of the economic value chain, the millions at the bottom of the pyramid, those who sell from their trades and table tops all over the markets in our country. We must develop the housing sector, both to provide much-needed shelter, but also to boost local opportunities in the local building and building materials sector. We know that we must ramp up agricultural production and provide a more efficient farm-to-market value chain. Again, creating millions of jobs in farming and agribusiness generally. We cannot successfully do any of these things without a massive improvement in our infrastructure, in power, in rail, in roads. But little can be done with industrialization without cheap credit to MSMEs in particular. Retail and service sectors need consumer credit to scale up. If you have to pay cash for everything from TV sets to cars, consumer spending will remain stunted and so will the real sector. The major housing reform, which we are undertaking with the family homes fund, needs a robust mortgage finance market. The bottom of the pyramid traders need micro-credit and financial inclusion. But the signing by Mr. President of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, there are great opportunities and challenges. We have great opportunities to extend the reach of our banking and financial services across Africa, where we are already making waves. And export more, where we are already exporting, especially in fast-moving goods, in cement, even fintech now. Services account at the moment for up to 50% of the GDP of most African countries and has accordingly been included as part of the phase one of the AFCTA, that's the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, in phase one of the negotiations. Five priority areas have been identified for liberalization, namely transport, communication, negotiations, tourism, financial services and business services. The approach that is being taken is that countries will make offers to liberalize these sectors and also agree on regulatory changes that will make it easier for the African sector operators to do business in other African countries. That's an interesting phase because it involves the financial sector, how that will be negotiated. Phase two of the negotiations will focus on investment, competition policy and intellectual property. Although it's a bit early now to know what the negotiations will yield, it is clear that the objective must be to ensure national treatment for African service operators in the different African countries where they all operate. This holds potential for the Nigerian banking sector, which is already present in several African countries, and is poised to take full advantage of the level playing ground that the AFCTA will offer them. But we must improve infrastructure to expand our manufacturing base and produce cheaper. This is crucial because we are also the target market for all of Africa. We are already dealing with the threat of smuggling. Practically all of the smuggling that we are seeing come naturally from our next-door neighbors. But we will now have to contend with the threat of dumping with the AFCTA. This is why the negotiations going on at the moment are crucial. And I think it's important for the banking sector to pay attention to what is going on and to participate in this entire process. We already have fairly robust participation from manufacturers as Asian and several other trade and professional organizations. But I think the chartered institute of bankers must pay close attention to the negotiations that are going on because a lot of it will affect the banking sector in Africa. But the substance of what I am saying is that our financial services sector now has to also redefine itself, challenge itself to partner with the public sector and players of course in the capital markets to reap the immense benefits that await our economy and our people in these changing times. We must jointly think through how to really lend to MSMEs and the entire real sector how to deepen capital markets on financial mediation, how to partner in developing our market market. What we need to do to deepen consumer credit, how purchase schemes etc. How about lending to agriculture? The CBN has already in partnership with Sundance successfully given loans to almost a million farmers under the anchor boroughs program. But the need is far greater. There is a series of measures we have taken to unlock lending to critical labour intensive sectors of the economy. In agriculture in particular we have seen how the Nigerian incentive based risk sharing system for agricultural lending otherwise known as NERSA has given the banking industry greater confidence to unlock new capital for agribusiness and troponials or those who are called agroponials today. By risking value chains across the nation, the immediate dividend of the enhanced agricultural productivity is of course a sharp increase in the population of employed and banked Nigerians while reducing our foreign exchange expenditure on food imports which can now of course be expended on expensive intrastructural needs and other investment programs for further job creation and enhanced financial inclusion. We are leveraging on the success of the knowledge and experience of our work with NERSA to also fundamentally reform the Solid Minerals Development Fund to risk value chains in the solid mineral sector with a risk sharing mechanism to secure lending from the banking sector for private capital to inflow and build new allied industries. We are also in discussions with PENCOM and some of those discussions we have had with some banks already along with PENCOM to do risk pension funds to enable lending for infrastructure development. There's a lot that's going on, there's a lot of talking that's going on, a lot of engagement that's going on but we really need to move this forward. We really need to start doing and implementing a lot of what has been happening. Of course there's a great deal of shyness because this is new territory for everybody but I think that we really need to move quickly and we need to move efficiently. Financial inclusion of course is the key to realizing so much of what we expect as an economy and the president promised in his June 12th speech to lift 100 million people out of poverty in 10 years. That is the commitment of the government of Nigeria. We started that journey with our collaboration with the Bank of Industry to deliver the Jeep program that's unknown as trader money and market money. By providing micro-credit to almost 2 million petty traders the Bank of Industry has now brought this huge bottom of the pyramid into the formal financial system and that has been recognized worldwide. Recently they won the AFDB prize for financial inclusion because of the work that they did with trader money. This is a huge task. Going forward we now need to embark on financial training for all of those who have been brought into the net. As you know when they're given 10,000 naira, just 10,000 naira when they pay back they're given 20,000 and 15,000 but it goes all the way. But at that point they're given their BVNs, they're given BVNs they're formally included in the financial system. They're formally included as formal traders and so we're able to train we're able to give them financial training and all that. Now the important thing and I have seen that sometimes we do not recognize real needs that they are and for very long that bottom of the pyramid has been completely excluded. And yet informal training is a significant, of course the most significant part of training that is going on in our country. But what we found is that these individuals were given the bottom who have small inventories, very small inventories as I was saying the other day. I was in KB state to commission to launch the trader money scheme there and I was speaking to a lady who had vegetables, selling vegetables, small vegetables after how much her entire inventory was. Everything she had on her trade was 500 naira. All that she was going to sell for morning to evening that day was 500 naira. I was very evident that clearly this is someone who obviously wants to work but there is no way that we are going to make any significant impact on your own life or the lives of your family if your inventory is only 500 naira. And that's the story of petty trading, that's the story of informal training across the country. Even here in Abuja, I met a lady who was selling pommas in a bucket and I keep telling the story every where I go. In her little bucket you have pommas, I'll tell you how much, I hope everybody knows what pommas are doing, because people are looking at me rather strangely. I see what is that for when I'm here. Anyway for those of us who know what pommas are doing, she was selling this in her little bucket and I asked her how much the entire inventory was, 3,500 naira. So I said to her how much do you make profits from 3,500 naira? She didn't even answer the question. She just pointed to another lady standing beside her, who had her own pomma in a little bowl. So she was just telling me that look here, I'm a big player here. Do we have any problems? You can ask this lady here how she is coping. So there is a real need out there and we must devise the methods by which those at the bottom of the pyramid can be uplifted. And we must look at how we can even resource the entire valuations. What we find is that those who are selling the petty trailer, who just has a trailer, is usually selling little bits of pieces from many of the manufacturers of fast moving products. And we found that just by giving them credit, we can resource that entire valuations all the way up. And we're working with the bank of industry with several players in the market, especially the marketing services people, to identify how to work through those valuations so that more and more of these people can move from petty trading higher up in one valuation as their resource. But all of that will depend on what the banking industry is prepared to do, how adaptable the banking industry will be to giving loans, especially micro-credit. Everything is changing very quickly. There is no question at all that the world that we're living in is disrupted daily by technology. On Azure is a very fortunate place. We are today the second largest users of mobile, of the internet on mobile phones, on our mobile phones. We are the second largest. We also possibly have the largest mobile banking business already. We already have the largest. In other words, because we have such a large number of telecom users, and I think we've got 117 million at the last count, there's a huge market out there that appears to be, I mean, the FinTech business and all of that, that appears to be somewhat outside the former banking system. I've been speaking to a lot of the telecoms, and I've had meetings with telecoms and banks, and there's a fair amount of tension going on, because obviously the telecoms appear to want to take the launch of the banks, and everyone is saying, no, you can't go that far, you can't do this, you must become a licensed bank and all that. And a lot of the FinTech companies are doing incredible things across borders, and we're at a point where you cannot stop anything, you can't stop the progress that is going on. There's no way, so we must sit down and develop policies, policies that will enable the FinTech companies to grow, policies that will find space, proper space for the telecoms also to grow. The banking industry is being disrupted and it simply must change, and this is happening everywhere, everywhere. But I see that the responses of many of the banks is a very progressive one, and the Central Bank also. We established something called the Creativity and Technology Group as part of the industrial council. And what has happened is that a lot of the young men and women, especially in FinTech and entertainment, who are part of that group, are showing how we can modify policy, especially policy that will help them to be able to not only access credit, but also change some of the rules for banking licenses and other financial services licenses, so that the FinTech companies can play a better role, so that all of these companies that are involved in the financial space can play a more active role, and we think that that is the way of the future. So we are living in exciting times, these times are the best times possible for business and for the Nigerian economy. I am extremely pleased to see that the theme of this conference seeks to address the changes that we should expect, not just on the banking sector, but on the entire economy. I want to congratulate again and commend the chatter of bankers and the leadership of the institute for thinking so forward-thinking and for thinking so clearly about what the future will be. In the next few days, I really hope that we will see and hear a lot of very interesting and exciting deliberations and conclusions that will enable this country to solve the problems that face it, and to take up all of the opportunities that awaited. So it is my very special privilege to formally declare open this 12 annual conference of the chapter institute of bankers. Thank you very much.