 Welcome to ITU Telecom World 2016 from Bangkok, Thailand. I'm very pleased to be joined in the studio today by Ari Sarkar, who is the co-president of Asia-Pacific Mastercard Worldwide. Ari, thank you very much for keeping with us today. President of Asia. I'd like to start off by asking you, is mobile an effective enabler for financial inclusion? And if so, how can we ensure that no one is left out of the digital revolution? Well, I think mobile is really a fundamental enabler for financial inclusion. If you really look at the last two decades of various attempts at financial inclusion, the traditional model of brick-and-mortar driven service models have actually failed. The price to revenue equation has never really worked for financial services companies. What you have now is real empowerment with mobile-based delivery capability, which is essentially what I call leading to much greater democracy in the way financial services gets delivered. And I think mobile coupled with the spread of broadband and 4G and LTE technology will ensure that you're able to reach deeper into lower starters of society, wider geographic coverage with the cost-to-value equation working out effectively. How does having more people in the financial system impact a country's overall development? Well, if you really look at bringing people onto the financial net has a very profound impact in any country's development. If I may talk about some of the bigger ills of the developing world is to do with things around a parallel economy, which is what we call the shadow economy, and governments lose out on taxation. There are various issues around counterfeit currency. There are challenges around terrorism. So anything that remains in cash-based transactional flow, it is rather fungible, and there's traceability and accountability is very low. So as you bring more and more people in the financial net and you create a digital flow environment, you're able to have much greater insights and the ability to monitor and control what's happening across the economy. And frankly, the cost of cash itself. If you really look at the cost of cash is estimated anything between half a percentage point of GDP to about one and a half to one and a 1.7%. And these are various studies that various institutions have done. So you can see there's a very significant growth aspect to bringing more people into the financial net, which leads to greater financing, more financial services, and therefore spurs overall economic development. What about the importance of collaboration? What challenges does that bring? I think collaboration is really the fundamental, what I call the cornerstone of the strategy. There are various stakeholders here. This is the government, you've got the financial regulator, you've got the telco regulators, you have the merchant and the consumer community, and not to forget the infrastructure and the device manufacturers. If you can't collaborate where you have a regulatory environment which is conducive to spread of financial inclusion, a technology enabled infrastructure which is reducing the cost points of service delivery, and a regulatory framework which encourages interoperability will have necessarily a profound impact if all these partners collaborate and work together. This has happened in drips and drabs, but we really hope in the coming decade, and there are many such signs, countries like India, there's very significant collaboration happening. The technology stacks that countries like India have put together is extremely powerful and we should see some very significant moves in the emerging world. Finally, what's the importance of attending events such as ITU Telecom World? What impact does it have, do you think? I think forums of this nature really brings together people from very many different backgrounds and disciplines and whether it's the regulator, whether it is the telco side, whether it is the financial services side, I just think there's a lot of learning to take from each side. And you know, forums of this nature, if you're able to have people understand each other's points of view and be able to take that away and then work and devise your strategy and also learn from each other. Best practices, good practices, I think will always be helpful to creating a more robust environment. Arish, thank you very much indeed. Pleasure, thank you very much.