 Welcome to the Fiji Symposium 2019 in Cairo, Egypt, where I've got the great pleasure of being joining the studio today, Mr Amro Moussa, who is the Ministerial Advisor of the Digital Economy for Egypt. Mr Moussa, welcome to the studio. Thank you. Now, I wanted to ask you, in terms of this symposium, it's all about digital financial inclusion, what is the landscape like in Egypt for digital financial inclusion? Well, in Egypt, we started by building what we call the National Citizen Database in order to have a complete screen about the Egyptian society. And we did classify families in Egypt into four classifications, which starts with non-poor, vulnerable, poor and very poor. We decided to concentrate on the bottom two layers, which is the poor and very poor, and start dealing with them by building a technology platform that gives enough tools to the financial domain in order to start two tailor packages that could suit those people. Especially that there are a lot of illiterate citizens within this domain. Now, a lot of talk has been here about encouraging people to move away from cash, obviously, to move away to more digital sources of finance here, using smartphones, using technology which is in the palm of their hands. What inroads have you been making here? Well, moving into a non-cash society needs a lot of work. My point of view was always, and my recommendations was always to the government, is that we should start by building first by putting a framework for digital currency. And then putting a roadmap for giving incentives and lowering the transaction fees and also giving social incentives to the poor within their e-wallets in order to pull them into the financial sector and motivate using e-wallets through paying, through paying their collections, through transferring money, and all other kinds of financial services. How important are public-private partnerships to make this a reality? Very important. You see what I just talked about is something that needs a lot of investment. And this is why Ministry of Communication and Information Technology went into an MOU on behalf of the Egyptian government to start building like a centralized switch that could offer something which we call in-kind traffic, which combines payment and digital services, government digital services together on one card, applying digital ID so that we can have everything to prevent cybercrime, to prevent fraud, to prevent non-repudiation, all those kind of issues and that will also help apply our cyber crime law. And what are the major concerns? Talking about crime, talking about trust, what are the major concerns of the population in adopting new technologies and new ways of payment? Well, crime could always hinder and could always deepen the distrust that is already available. But by combating crime you will always give people the confidence and the trust into the infrastructure and into the systems and applications that you are applying in order to encourage them to come on board and use those applications and this infrastructure. There was a hackathon here yesterday. There were some very interesting projects, applications that were being produced, particularly for this competition, but I think obviously there will be more generally and widespread as well, I'm sure. What is the government doing to encourage SMEs and innovators to be able to contribute to this? Well, SMEs, the main obstacle is micro-financing and micro-financing requires credit scoring and credit scoring requires a citizen profile. So this is where we started. We started by building the national citizen database. We classified families so we have a complete screen about the wealth distribution in Egypt so we can offer tools to micro-finance authorities to be able to finance SMEs and bring them on board. Do you see a time where cash isn't first here in Egypt but the people are either paying with, by electronic means, with cards or through their telephones, etc., and receiving payments in that way? I know that inroads are being made in that duration, but how far ahead do you think that that's going to be in the future? Do you mean our KPIs? What are we expecting? Well, there are no exact expectations, to be honest with you, and this is why I was always calling for the formulation of a national financial inclusion strategy to restructure the market setup and to put the right responsibilities and the right roles to each stakeholder within this ecosystem and be able to manage every one of them. Now, coming back here to this symposium here, this Fiji symposium is obviously being very graciously hosted here in Egypt. Why is this initiative important to Egypt? Well, you have a big informal economy and you have a financial deficit. This is because there are a lot of people who are not inside your official financial ecosystem. So it's very important to onboard all those people in order to enrich our economy and know who needs help, financial help, who doesn't need financial help and who doesn't need financial help, and to be able to direct money into the right place. What advice would you give to countries that are trying to really bring digital financial inclusion to the table there that are really trying to emphasise that to their citizens? Number one, the thing that we did, build a national citizen database to screen your whole citizens and to know who deserves and who doesn't. And finally, I'm sure you've been part of a lot of the discussions here at the symposium. What do you think will be the key takeaways from this particular symposium? A lot of recommendations that have been taken, a lot of remarks that have been taken and also from my point of view we have some authorities that were being invited to this symposium and they knew now why are we requiring certain projects, why are we into certain projects and why are we asking for help into certain projects so they have broadened their picture and they now value what we are already doing. Well thank you very much for sharing these valuable insights with us and we wish you the very best of luck in the future and hopefully we'll catch up with you again soon. Thank you. Thank you and welcome to Egypt.