 Good afternoon and welcome. We're coming to you from day three of the Fiji Symposium in Bangalore, the platform for all dialogue on financial inclusion. And with me today is the former head of National Payments System from the Central Bank of Kenya, Stephen Muara Duati. Welcome, sir, and thank you for being part of the Fiji Symposium. Thank you. How does it feel like to be part of the first ever symposium? The honor of being interviewed in this forum. Participation in this forum has been a blessing to me. First, I can see the progress towards using the example of telecommunications. How many people are now communicating in the world? Because thanks to the ITU and what you have been doing. And more important, if we can access communication, why can't we access finance? So what we would say is that we in Kenya pioneered the use of the mobile gadget to access financial services. Why did we do so? For the many years, over 100 years, less than 20% of the population was accessing financial services. Sure, something had to change. And it is this time when we wanted to leverage on technology to avail financial services through technology, but regulating it in a manner that it is safe and secure. Because if you do not regulate a product, especially of financial nature, the repercussions can be detrimental. So I'm happy to be in Bagaro, a beautiful city. I wish I could be here longer. But I'm also happy because ITU has picked this topic as one of the topics to drive forward. I participated in the previous project of AFI, Association of Financial Inclusion, thanks to Bill and Merida Gates, thanks to the various entities, World Bank, who supported that process. That one was more towards banks, regulators. This one is moving towards technology regulators. I am looking forward to the day when they will sit together, not when they'll be sitting separately. So you just spoke about a lot of financial services. What exactly is the potential of these digital financial services to increase financial inclusion? If I give the numbers of Kenya, and Kenya represents what is happening in Africa, at the time when we started mobile, the MPSA case, the access to banking services was around 20%. We've leveraged on mobile financial services to handle low-value retail money transfers. We have seen a tremendous improvement. By the time we did a survey on the access to financial services in Kenya, we are talking about over 75% of the population are able to access form of financial services using the mobile. We are at the very beginning of this process. Fortunately, the rest of the world has not picked these, especially the models that are working. It is important to share models that are working and to see whether we can improve on them. There is also this theory you don't have to reinvent the wheel. If you realize it's working in Nigeria, if you realize it's working in South America, try and borrow so that we move faster. Yes, we can leverage on them, and we have seen tremendous success in Kenya. The remaining portion of the population that is not accessing financial services, we can call that the remaining 25% or 20%. That one will require that we improve on the way we allow these persons to access various other services, including the perennial issue of poverty. So we are talking about these people are not accessing these financial services. What do you think are the few factors that might be important for them to actually prefer these financial services over traditional methods of cash? I've given many presentations on these. In fact, if you go through the web, you'll see very many. I do give the reasons why especially Africa, Asia have lagged behind in terms of access to financial services. It is very clear that in a case like Africa, infrastructure, if you are going to provide financial services through brick and mortar, you cannot overcome the issues of roads, the issues of how do I access those places, terrain, distance, and people are distributed in rural areas, villages. You can never be able to provide that through brick and mortar. That actually by now should be a known fact. The second one is literacy and which is very, very important. The goodness with the mobile telephone systems is that they are easy to use. You find that even at a very low level of education will allow you to navigate through the mobile very easily. And equally, we can design products that are easy to access and the credibility can be enhanced through proper regulation. And therefore, there is potential while in the old methods, you really had to go to village and you had to talk to people. Retrace was an impossibility. Today, you can deliver retrace through the technology with the current network arrangements. You can educate a lot of people very quickly. So we in the world do not have a reason to have two billion members of our citizens in the whole world having no access to financial services. Yet we can use this technology. The whole world is revered on technology to drive inclusion. After all, what is poverty? Poverty is an ability to access very many things. You don't access clean water. You don't access telephony. You don't access schools. You don't access hospitals. So if we can tackle access to finance, we'll have done a lot of damage to poverty. And my view, the most important thing to deal with in this world is poverty. If we do anything to drive poverty down, we'll be successful. You are not just saying access to financial services. We are saying access it, develop and reduce your poverty. And I may also want to say this. In the case of mobile money, especially in Kenya, we are able to drive even less than two dollars through the channel. And thank you, because MNOs are much, much more innovative than many of the traditional providers. So they have also been able to be able to give financial services the poor, especially if you are moving less than two dollars. In Kenya, you don't pay anything for it. So we can be able to target the areas where we'll make a lot of difference. So if I can transfer two dollars to anybody without paying, that is purely good financial inclusion agenda. Equally, when you want to spread the social benefits, for example, in our country now, we want to target the old people. When people get to over 70 years, they are not able to earn, they are not able to work. If you have social benefits that you can be distributing to these members, using these channels, it is easy to reach each and every member without going through an intermediary. So these members are able to get the financial services directly. And that has a lot of impact on the longevity of life. So you soon begin to see the live longevity, even in those parts of the world, who start improving. There's no reason why parts of the world should be having longevity of 40 years when the rest of the world are living closer to 100. Let's make all of us live longer and enjoy this world. We are not in a hurry to go anywhere. That's beautiful on that note. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for being part of PG. Thank you.