 Joining me now is Mr. Roger Voorhees. He is the Managing Director of Global Development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Hello. Hi. Welcome. Well, thank you very much for flying in a long way from Seattle to be with us here. It must be important. Tell us what you're doing. So the Gates Foundation has been, for the last five or six years, extremely active in bringing financial inclusion to reach poor people. And that's been really driven by our belief that while all people have equal value, not all people have equal opportunity. And in the case of financial services, with two and a half billion people originally left out, and then with the latest FNDEX numbers, two billion as of last year left out, we think it's a huge opportunity to drive development and drive access. And we think the ITU is an incredible piece of an important opportunity and an important player in moving that forward. Well, give me a bit more of an idea of what exactly the foundation does in this area. So the foundation really started out by asking three kinds of questions. Why do financial services matter to poor people? Why do we care about it? Why do the existing informal tools they use not work for them? And then thirdly, what would have to change in the underlying economics to bring financial services in a sustainable way to poor people? And when we looked around it, what we found out really clearly is that poor people are not statically poor, but they rise and fall through poverty based on their ability to absorb a shock when it happens in the household. And that can be a bad shock, like a health shock, or even a good shock, like having a baby, and to capture opportunities. And a great deal of research we've done around this area with a lot of academics around the world have said financial services are incredibly important in protecting people against those shocks and helping them climb out of poverty. So if that is one of the goals, and there are so many people left out, what would have to actually change in the economics to make it possible? And we were really driven by the idea that if you could make transactions digital, you could cut 90% of the cost out and suddenly radically change access to financial services in a sustainable way rather than just simply losing money every time you saw the poor person coming to your establishment. And the ITU became part of that because mobile phones have such great penetration rates, and there are close to what, over 90 Sims per every person on the planet. And so we just felt that it was a great leverage point, and we've enjoyed the partnership with the ITU as a way to really drive the right quality standards, the right kind of regulatory standards, as well as creating toolkits that would allow governments to implement the right regulations that keep the compliance costs low, but actually empower MNOs and other telecom regulators in those countries to drive access. Now the impression one gets is that the Gates Foundation is a foundation that's looking for results. Clear results, people remember the mosquito nets initiative, a big headline grabber. In this area it seems a lot more complicated than that. So what defines success for your foundation? So I think for us we're really defined success at the household level. We want to see what's the impact to low-income people, and that means both access to financial services and use of financial services. So the ability to save, the ability to transmit and send money to friends and family. And we're actually seeing some great successes around the world. Like we said, the Global Findex, which is the World Bank report which measures financial inclusion in the last four years, basically that number fell by half a billion people, which in the world of development is a large impact. Tied to that, I think we're seeing emerging stories of real impact happening around the world in just a couple examples. So in Kenya, just being a member of EMPESA and having access to a low-cost and robust payment system, an academic study found that if you were a member of EMPESA and you had a shock in your household, you were able to draw really quickly from friends and family to get money you needed, and you would ride out that shock with no decrease in disposable income. But if you were not a member of EMPESA, even six months later, your disposable income had fallen by 10%. Another story out of Malawi where we saw that just helping farmers save from one harvest season to the next increased fertilizer use by 35% and disposable income by 17%. And then I think the third one that we're excited about is the push that we heard earlier even today from the government of India around bringing direct benefit transfers to low-income people using technology and through mobile devices. And one of the largest random control trials in the world was done in India around in raga payments, which is a government transfer scheme. And by moving to a digital environment, the average person got 24% more money. And then a McKinsey study from several years ago said that if McKinsey could digitize its payments from government to people, they could save $22 billion. So while it's a little more complicated than the malaria story, what matters at the household impact level I think is equally powerful. And we're actually seeing great movement taking place. And explain where your foundation sits within this multilateral UN ITU approach. So we're a private foundation. We're really driven by where does philanthropy help to create public goods? And we really sit in the background, right? How do we work to enable groups like the ITU, groups who are on the ground, our partners working with low-income people and working with countries? We're there to provide three kinds of support. One is to make sure that we can support and bring academic research and rigor to the process to make sure that we're doing the right things in the right way. And that's both on what works and what has impact for low-income people. But also how do the regulatory systems need to change in order to be safe and secure so we don't risk everybody up but actually get all the benefits of low cost out of it? So how do we cut compliance costs but not actually cut safety to the end customer? So we do a lot of research. The second thing we do is a lot of data collection and make sure that data is available to help people make good decisions. And then the third thing is once we get the right rules in place, what's the right infrastructure? And so we've launched with partners of ours, something called the Level One Project, which is really looking at what are the right kinds of infrastructure that need to be in place for low-cost, robust, and open payment systems? And then the last thing is we work on the ground with NGOs, with governments and other partners to run experimental models to actually create demonstration cases. And that's really where we spend our time. In the four years before this process was even set up, we saw between 500 and 700 million people already brought out of financial exclusion. So now we do have this process in place. You're involved. So what are you looking to see as a success in the years going forward? So, I mean, the number is actually five to 700 million people. And so that was a pretty substantial drop. We would like in the next four to five years to see that happen again. And I think we have a long-term goal of actually having full inclusion. But we would think in the next four to five years you'd see another drop of several hundred million people. But it's not just access that we're interested in. We're hoping that in the next four years, and we think the ITU could be part of that, is a rollout of really impactful applications and usage that are meaningful at the household level. And let me see if I can give you some examples that we're actually hearing people talk about this week at the ITU. One is, how do low-income people receive government transfers in a way that is both help them save but also that keep control of their funds so that you can eliminate leakage and other kinds of corruption? Secondarily, as you think about mobile hands-up and mobile devices, how do we make sure we have a rollout of the quality necessary to run mobile financial services in rural areas? And I think thirdly, we would love to see in the next four years a complete closure of the 10 to 15 percent gender gap that exists where women have the same kind of access as men. And I think that's both a problem of cost, that's a problem of infrastructure, and a problem of quality. And we think the ITU in cooperation with other regulators on the banking side can actually be two sides or two streams that actually support that rolling out. And so we're pretty excited about it, and we think we'll make even faster progress with this working group that's going forward within the ITU on digital financial services. Well, I'm sure we'll be talking again to monitor that progress. Roger Fourhees, thank you very much. Thanks very much. Thanks for the time.