 Welcome to the ITU studio in Geneva. We're very pleased to be joined in the studio today by Barry Cooper, who is from the Center for Financial Regulation and Inclusion, or SEMFRI. Barry, welcome to the studio. Thank you. Now, I'd like to start off by perhaps we could talk a little bit about your experience in your organization, in the area of digital currency or central bank digital currency. It is a while. We keep a lookout for instruments and payment systems that can benefit particularly developing economies. That's been on our radar. And we started looking at the deeper research in from 2016 onwards. And that's culminated in our first note, our first explosion note into the risks and benefits particularly with a developing economy mindset. And then that prompted us to look at particularly mobile money and the implications for different types of being agnostic to the different types of CBDC or DFC, overlaid on mobile money schemes, typical mobile money schemes that we found in our research. And there was a very interesting piece of research because it pointed us to the simplification of something that was quite complex and had grown up passively in various jurisdictions and was quite meaningful for those jurisdictions. So let's focus on central banks. Why should central banks consider issuing digital currency? Yeah, so that is a... I mean, some should and some most should consider, but some should really just consider it very, very well. Depending on all the preconditions, what is it that present themselves in each jurisdiction? But typically, what it can do is it can bridge the gap between a cash economy and a formalized economy. And that's very, very important because in most developing economies, you have upwards of 80% plus of the transactions in that economy done in cash. Cash is very expensive. Cash is difficult to transact over distance. And so a CBDC has a lot of those benefits, but it comes with a lot of health warnings as well. Now, you were based in Cape Town. What's the financial landscape like there? In Cape Town, we have the... I mean, in South Africa, obviously, not just in Cape Town itself, yeah. Cape Town and South Africa, we've got the full spectrum. We've got from very indigent people to very affluent. And so it gives us a really good insight into how these different systems interoperate at different market levels and with different needs. And so that's provided the impetus to look at other developing economies. Now, we mostly work in developing economies. We hardly do anything in South Africa. And I presume that the differences are quite varied, I mean, in terms of developing economies and developed economies. Yes, and particularly what we find important is not to take a developed economy mindset and try and cut and paste it into a developing context. The context really matters and harmonising a technology or a system into a developing world is very intricate. You need to really understand how that economy works and how things need to get sewn together. What are the main challenges, let's say, facing central banks in issuing digital currencies? Well, they're a number. Particularly in the developing world, capacity or expertise. Typically what happens is that as you develop expertise in the developing world, they migrate to the developed world. So it's getting their core expertise there. But it's also getting the prerequisite conditions like ITC infrastructure, communications infrastructure is vitally important to support it. You need to look at offline online capabilities. Those are all important. And those aren't usually problems you find to a significant degree in developed worlds. And finally, in what areas of digital currency are standards required for central banks and how do you think that the output of the digital currency focus group or ITU could help bridge the standards gap? Well, rigid standards are difficult to employ in developing markets. And the ITU focus group is assisting with creating guidelines of guidance that are not as rigid as standards, but that can in a sense create the potential for interoperability or harmonisation between different countries because ultimately, DFC or digital currency at some point will interoperate between countries. All right, well, Barry, thank you very much for joining us in the studio today. We hopefully will catch up with you again at some stage in the near future. And thank you for your work in the focus group as well. Thank you very much. Cheers.