 Welcome to the ITU studio in Geneva. I'm very pleased to be joining the studio today by John Kiff, who is a senior financial expert for the IMF, the International Monetary Fund. John, welcome to the studio. Thanks, Max. Now, I'd like to start off by talking a little bit about perhaps you could share your experience at the IMF in the area of digital currency, which is very much what we've been focusing on this week, or central bank digital currency. Yeah, I mean, the fund is obviously an international monetary fund. Monetary is a key component of our work. And until recently, that would be focused on conventional money. But now with the world of crypto and cryptocurrencies and so on, there's been a growing interest in applying some of that technology to central banks and their money making operations. And for many, they've seen opportunity to save money by reducing the number of paper bills and coinage that they issue and replace it with digital currency. And so many of our member countries, and there's around 180 of those I lose count, maybe it's 190, but they're coming to us now and saying, we would like to be part of this new revolution. And that one of our roles is to give what we call technical assistance to countries that are, and in this case, want to come first and out of the starting gate and start issuing central bank digital currencies. So why should central banks consider issuing digital currencies? And if so, for what purpose? I mean, we obviously say you mentioned they're reducing paper, et cetera, but what are the other advantages that they could hope for? Well, we think in fact there's other more important dimensions that they should be considering. And one of them is financial inclusion. In many of the countries that we service, there are many people who are unbanked. And sometimes they're unbanked because they've got very concentrated banking systems that aren't incentivized to bring in new technology and so on. And everybody these days wants to be in the new mobile money world and so on and digital banking. And in other cases, we're talking about, say, island countries where there's just not much of a business case for a bank to set up a bricks and mortar branch on these individual islands. And so you've got people that have no access to banking services at all. And so I think that's a very compelling case for many. And some of the advanced countries, the amount of cash being used is falling rapidly. Sweden's the poster child for that where apparently you can go into some restaurants and they will refuse your cash. And in that case, the central bank fears that money making and money management has fallen out of the central bank's hands. It's now being run by private actors. China, for instance, has the similar problem. We've got Alipay and WeChat Pay. You go to China and pull out your wallet and try to pay in the local currency. Forget it. I've been there and I was almost starved except that someone was at the table who had an Alipay account. Wow, that's great. I haven't been there for a while, but obviously things are changing quite rapidly. You say a lot of countries are approaching you saying, you know, we desperately want to get involved. But I think that I was asking somebody here yesterday in terms of the rollout time, it's, of course, going to vary quite substantially. What are the main issues and challenges that they're going to be facing? The main first issue is they've got to realize that this is not just a matter of setting up a computer in the basement that's going to spit out new digital notes instead of physical notes. A central bank digital currency operation involves beefing up IT operations and cybersecurity. We hear about all these hacks. We'll imagine a hack of that computer that generates the bank notes. It would be the ultimate in counterfeit because you could create billions of dollars or whatever currency overnight. So there's all sorts of infrastructure issues that have to be considered. In fact, in my presentations I often show what we call a circle of life for cash. And that usually involves printing money, designing money, shipping it out to banks and distributing it and ultimately destroying it when the bills are old. And then beside it I have a circle of life for a digital currency and it looks an awful lot the same. There's a counterpart to almost everything you do on a cash operation that you have to do in the digital side. And in a way the cost balance is different in cash. It's a lot of physical type expenses, transportation, printing. On the digital side it's sort of on the other end of the circle which is the things like the IT infrastructure, cybersecurity and so on. So what's the, in terms of trust you mentioned of course people, individuals are going to be quite concerned. You mentioned the circle of money, paper, money that's obviously being created and then eventually having to be destroyed if they haven't been hiding it under the bed, etc. But in principle is it digital financial inclusion that's going to be the biggest incentive or is it going to be something else? I think the most compelling case is for the inclusion aspect. Even though we know some of the advanced countries are looking at it, China, Canada and Sweden and so on and of course they're not going to come into us for this technical assistance I mentioned so that's maybe another reason why I sort of put them aside. And so the countries that are coming to us are looking at the financial inclusion angles being the primary one for them. In one case for instance Uruguay they've done an actual pilot and one of their motivations was that the population wasn't being served well by the existing banks and in effect the central bank is looking, this is a way of giving a little prod to the banks. So actually a successful implementation of a central bank digital currency there may not be massive take up of central bank digital currency but it could be that the banks will step up to the plate and start offering digital services to their clients. And then finally in what areas of digital currency are standards required for central banks and how do you think that the output of the focus group that you've been involved with the digital fiat currency focus group could help or ITU in general in fact could help to bridge the standards gap? Well most of the thinking to this point for us has been about what we call retail central bank digital currencies to be used domestically only. They're not intended to be used outside the country. But we look to the next stage where other adjacent countries or trading partners are also joining the party and there's also countries that are very tourism oriented. They've got people coming in that want to exchange their digital currency for that country's digital currency. So some degree of interoperability is required I think for that future world. So why not now build towards that future by building standardization into central bank digital currencies so that when you move up beyond the domestic only CBDC that you're ready to interoperate with other countries. And so in that case that's where the work we're doing here at the ITU is really important because we're moving towards that standardization because other individual central banks aren't terribly motivated to standardize. They just want to get something out the door that suits their needs. But we're the guys that say wait a minute let's do this properly. Let's try to build as much commonality as possible in our products so that some years down the road when we've got these vibrant central bank digital currency ecosystems in our countries we're ready to link up with others. Thank you very much for joining us today in the studio and sharing some very valuable insights and we hopefully will catch up with you again in some stage in the very near future. Thanks Max. Thanks a lot.