 Welcome to the Fiji Symposium 2019 here in Cairo in Egypt where I'm very pleased to be joined in the studio today by Hemant Baigel who is the Vice President for Community Relations and Global Policy Affairs for Mastercard. Hemant, welcome to the studio. Thank you. Now let's talk a little bit about digital financial services obviously that's what we're very much focusing on here. What do you think it would take for the world's poorest people to prefer digital financial services over cash? Do you think that digital financial services will be enough for this to happen? So if you look at today's environment, a majority of the poor, no matter where you are, Africa, Asia, Latin America, they prefer cash over digital because that's what they know best. It gives them a sense of finality or a settlement that happens right away. It is something that they trust. So if you want digital financial services to become part of their lives, it has to be something that's usable by them. So it has to be what's called a customer-centric solution that has to be and not something that somebody in a big room can decide that this is best for the consumers and this is best for small businesses or the target community. So I think that's the first premise. To give you a way of an example, Mastercard has this solution called Mastercard. We in the financial or this community, we talk a great deal about access usage gap, right? So we have a solution called Mastercard Farmers Network which was initially launched in Kenya and in Tanzania now it's sort of being scaled to other markets. That was the primary example of customer-centric. So basically women farmers, smallholder farmers, they sell produce to the local markets. So this platform basically gave a transaction account to these people which otherwise they would have no need for. So if you go out there through some other means or some program and give them a transaction account, they will say, what do I do with it? But now here's a proposition where you sell produce, but we want to take your produce to a bigger marketplace where there is a big set of buyers who want to buy your produce because today you don't have the capability to go beyond your immediate market. So this platform was developed, you know, there's a buyer, seller, it's a marketplace. By the way, if you want to do this, have a transaction account, then you don't have to worry about cash payments and all that. So there was immediate sort of like a thing that was created, okay now I can use this thing. It was mobile driven and so on and so forth. So that's what I'm talking about. It has to be customer-centric. And what innovations do you think are required in regulatory collaboration to create an enabling environment for digital financial services? I think that's a very, very important question and we in the private sector are constantly sort of like in discussions with institutions like the World Bank and others to ensure when they advise governments this is the primary point. I mean I think a lot of governments recognize that but the argument actually gets a little diluted or customized based on how they want to implement this. So to again give you an example, I think we as a global company sometimes face challenges from domestic sort of players. Not that it's a bad thing if you look at like a pure competition standpoint but when it's a preferential sort of treatment that's given to domestic over foreign on the grounds of X, Y and Z, then it becomes an issue, then it's not an enabling environment that sort of curves innovation and it just creates a whole bunch of other problems. I think the enabling environment is key. I mean open competition ability for everybody to participate equally on equal footing and then also then you have other bits in play where you have the right regulations and also governments or central banks or regulators not sort of having a need to immediately come up with regulations, try out things first, those kind of things. And what role can governments play to enhance usage of digital financial services at national level? So usage is a very, as I said in the beginning, it's a very sort of peculiar sort of a thing. I mean you cannot sort of assume that you will build this castle and people will come or use the castle to stick with the team. I think it has to be whether this castle is usable for whatever purposes. So it has to be, I mean in the government, no matter where you are, whether you're in a developing or a developed country, does not have that information. So you have to rely on private sector because they are the ones who have customer relationships. They understand the needs of the customer. So it has to be some sort of a public-private partnership, whether it's handled through a National Payments Council where you are developing these visions for the country, five-year, 10-year visions for the country. That's where, that could potentially be a starting point. But then at the end of the day it's a private sector who has to come up with a plan and then the government sort of enforces it somehow. Well thank you very much for joining us in the studio today and hopefully we'll catch up with you again some stage in the future. Great, thank you.