 Welcome to the Fiji Symposium 2019 here in Cairo, Egypt, where I'm very pleased to be joining the studio today by Pia Bernadette Roman Tayag, who is Managing Director for Financial Inclusion and Consumer Protection for the Central Bank of the Philippines. Welcome to the studio. Thank you for having me. Now, I'd like to start off by talking a little bit about people preferring digital financial services over cash and in particular the world's poorest people. Do you think that digital financial services will be enough for this to happen? I think digital financial services will be a powerful tool to reach the unserved and underserved, especially those who are finding it very difficult to reach traditional brick-and-mortar financial institutions. What's the landscape like in the Philippines at the moment for this? Well, to give you an idea, the Philippines is an archipelago of 7,100 islands, so the traditional brick-and-mortar models of financial institutions will really make it difficult to penetrate areas that are hard to reach. And digital solutions are able to address this barrier, lower costs in reaching this population, so we think it is a powerful tool. What about regulation? What innovations are required, do you think, in regulatory collaboration to create an enabling environment for digital financial services? Well, first of all, we need to be aware of what's happening in the market. A lot of the innovation is happening in the private sector. Regulators need to keep pace with what is happening to be able to put in place the regulation that will provide a clear framework to ensure safety and soundness, protection of consumers, but at the same time, not stifle innovation. In the Philippines, what we've done to promote digital financial inclusion is actually three areas. First is to first make sure people have an account. You can't really transact digital without an account where you can store value, receive or send funds. So, we have opened up access to what we call a basic deposit account. It can also be an e-money account where we've addressed the usual barriers of people not opening one. Documentary requirements, maybe the fee, some charges due to dormancy or balances that go beyond below a certain limit. So, this framework makes it easy for people to open an account. Once they have an account, we have to make sure they use it. What we are doing now is putting in place an interoperable retail payment system where people can send funds and money from any account to any account. This will make it easy to pay bills, to get remittances, which is very important in the Philippines, and also to pay bills and put people to people transfers. The third one is to first make sure they have access points where they can convert cash to digital. That's the first step. Hopefully they won't need to go out into the cash world too often. Through this, we have an agent banking regulation where we allow our financial institutions to use retail outlets like small stores, a pharmacy that are close to the people and make those their touch points before they go digital. What's been the uptake of this? These are actually very new, maybe just in the last two to three years. We are hoping this together with also recent developments such as the foundational digital ID that was just recently enacted to be really the pieces of the puzzle that will make us leap towards greater digital financial inclusion. How do you see the fintech sector reshaping digital financial services? The fintech sector is reshaping the financial services in the way financial products are delivered and designed. It's providing an opportunity first to reach markets that the traditional players are not reaching. It is also making opportunities for partnerships and linkages and new business models that were not there before. We are seeing some of our banks collaborating with fintechs, fintechs being regulated formally under the central bank. There are many new business models, new delivery, new products. What role do you think governments can play to enhance usage of digital financial services at the national level? There are many things we need to put in place. One is regulation to make sure, as I said, that we don't stifle the innovation that is happening. But second is to ensure trust and certainty in the system. So people will not make the shift if they don't trust it. People will not make the shift if they also do not know about it. So digital literacy plays a big role also hand in hand with financial literacy. And these are things that government should do and should do together with the different partners, different government agencies and the private sector together to address these needs. I did say finding better. I'll ask you one more question. We're here at the Fiji Symposium. Obviously you've taken the time to be here. I just really wanted to find out what will be some of the key takeaways for you from this symposium. Well, one key takeaway is really the need to work together. The collaboration between not just the financial sector regulators, but also the telecom regulators. There's really a blurring of lines in some of the models that we are seeing in the market. And so communication is key among regulators and also those who are regulated, so the private sector. So that's one key takeaway in terms of broad themes. But I also learned a lot on the technical aspects in terms of identification, authentication. And these are very relevant issues for the Philippines today. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us in the studio and giving us a little bit of an insight of what it's like in your neck of the woods. And we hope to catch up with you very soon. Thank you very much. Thank you.