 I'm very pleased to welcome to the studio someone who knows the ITU very well. It's Bilal Jammusi, you're the chief of the study groups department at the standardisation bureau for the ITU. Now coordinating the world is a very complicated task, as you well know, your job involves coordinating study groups, focus groups, global standardisation initiatives, other kinds of activities. But I don't think we're going to go through all of those, I think we'll be here for quite a few days if we do. Let's start with focus groups. So we are here at the time when the digital financial services focus group is meeting. How does that fit into the overall ITU process? Sure, so the focus group is an open platform. It's open to members and non-members of the ITU. And we usually, when we have a topic of intersection of common interest to the telecom sector but also to adjacent sectors like the financial sector in this case. The focus group becomes an interesting platform that's open to bring both parties to the table to have these discussions of future interest to the world really. So we're talking about private companies, governments, regulators? Yes, that's the unique value proposition of the ITU and being able to convene private sector companies, regulators of telecoms, governments, academia to talk about the issues around financial services. Okay, and why was it necessary to set up this focus group and why now? Well, the focus group has been set up for one year now. Today is the second workshop that we're hosting around digital financial services. And when we set up this focus group a year ago it really came at the request of the Gates Foundation as one of our new sector members in ITU to work on digital financial services because in the world there are about two billion people, adults that don't have bank accounts, they have no bank services. Out of those two billion people, one and a half billion have mobile phones. And so we can reach out through digital financial services to 1.5 billion of the unbanked population. And who's best to convene that dialogue than the ITU where we have this reach to telecom regulators, to the private sector companies. And then through the focus group we opened to the financial sector and convened the workshop a year ago to start the dialogue. And today we're celebrating one year since this kickoff to really go deeper into the issues of relevance to this focus group. And is that because it's been perceived as a not particularly well-regulated sector up until this moment? The issue with digital financial services, it falls in the jurisdiction of two regulators, the telecom regulator and the central banks or the financial regulator. And if we don't have a constructive dialogue among those two entities it's very hard to roll out digital financial services. So the heart of the discussion in the focus group is to create that dialogue between the financial service regulator and the telco regulator. And to draft guidelines or MOUs between the financial service regulator and the telco to enable the rollout of digital financial services globally. And in your experience of these kind of focus groups with private industry government regulators, is it like people speaking completely different languages? Is it hard for them to understand each other? Sometimes they come with a different interest in mind. So the companies want to make money and to grow the business which is understandable. The governments and the regulators have the interest of the citizens in mind. And so the ITU provides a unique platform where the various stakeholders and various interest groups can come together and find a common denominator that suits all the interests and allow in this case the digital financial services to be rolled out. Now I'm sure that a year in this kind of process is quite a short time scale. What can realistically be achieved within a year? Right now we have three drafts. The focus group has had four meetings since its initiation and has been working on three recommendations or draft output documents. One is the frame MOU between a digital financial regulator and telco regulator. A set of tools and guidelines. And a blueprint really on how to roll this out in terms of interoperability. They're not final products but they are quite mature and in this meeting this week these deliverables are getting advanced quite a bit. And then the focus group has one more year before it finally produces its final output to move into the various study groups. In the ITU we have study groups that look at the regulatory aspects of the financial services. We have study groups looking at the quality of service. Another study group looking at the digital identity management and security. And these are all topics of key interest to be able to roll out digital financial services. And so the output from this focus group will span out into the various study groups to become international recommendations from the ITU. Given the exponential growth of mobile take up I presume that this means that the area that we're looking at digital financial services and getting people out of financial exclusion is going to be more and more important. Become more and more a priority for the ITU. Is that the case? Indeed. In fact next year we have our world telecom standards assembly at the end of 2016. Given the success of this focus group and the importance of this topic. It's expected that there will be some sort of a resolution of the world telecom standards assembly on this topic. To continue to enable the market to continue to enable the regulatory environment. And to put the focus, the necessary attention around the digital financial services and the financial inclusion as a whole. Well the whole fintech sector is a fascinating sector. Bill Elgiomysi, thank you very much and I wish you all the best. Pleasure. Thank you.