 So welcome back everybody and welcome to our new guests. We've, I think, resolved all of our technical difficulties. We're happy to have you back for the University of Michigan Central Bank of the Future Conference, which is hosted here at the University of Michigan by the Center on Finance, Law and Policy. For those of you who are watching online or new to the audience, I'm Michael Barr. I'm the faculty director of the Center on Finance, Law and Policy, as well as the Joan and Sanford Wildein of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. And good afternoon, everyone. I'm Adrian Harris. I'm a senior research fellow at the Center, as well as a professor of the practice at the Ford School of Public Policy. We're thrilled to have so many distinguished speakers here today, including governors, deputy governors of central banks, and former governors, including what we'll have with us tomorrow, Governor Ingves from the Riggs Bank in Sweden, Deputy Governor Timothy Lane who's been with us today and will be with us tomorrow from the Bank of Canada, Deputy Governor Halal from the Central Bank of Egypt, Deputy Governor Ahmad from the Central Bank of Nigeria, and former Governor Indungu from the Central Bank of Kenya. We have an outstanding lineup of speakers joining us over the next couple of days, policymakers, fintech executives, journalists, academics, and leaders from various disciplines, and many stakeholders in the audience today from a number of organizations, including the World Bank, the IMF, CGAP, Financial Health Network, and others. As many of you know, this is a small part of a larger research project that Adrian and I are conducting in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that is looking to illuminate the technology, business, and policy innovations that can be used to improve financial inclusion around the world. Technology has already dramatically changed financial services, whether these changes lead to more affordable, useful services that benefit low- and moderate-income people, where those who live in rural areas or lack permanent address or don't have identification, whether it leads to fewer services or less affordable options, that's a result of the decisions that we'll be making now and many decades into the future. The experts who we'll be presenting over the next few days and who are asking questions from the audience come from lots of different backgrounds, but we're all united in the goal of expanding access to financial inclusion and working to make a financial system that works for everyone. We hope you'll leave this conference with a different outlook and the number of new ideas that will spur further discussion. And as part of that, we hope this conference will inspire you to submit a proposal to present at next year's conference. So part of what you'll find in your packets are a call for papers, including deadlines and other logistics for policy proposals, research ideas, technology proposals that we can present next year. There's also a few other items in your registration packets that I'd like to call your attention to. First, the University of Michigan's Fintech Collaboratory has issued a request for proposals to fund interdisciplinary research, papers, courses, and educational initiatives around the university with an emphasis on blockchain applications. Second, this Friday, the fourth, is the deadline for the U of M students to register for the 2019 Ross Fintech Challenge. It's a pitch competition where students can win cash for developing Fintech cash, students love cash, we all love cash, for developing a Fintech solution to modern business problems with the potential for social impact. Third, you'll also find in your packet for a flyer for October 18th, U of M's innovation and action is hosting a financial inclusion design jam where student teams will be challenged to take the best components of bank, credit union, and other lending products and create a universally easy and affordable short-term loan product in just four hours. I wanna go over a few additional details for the next couple of days. You are in Palmer Commons in the Great Lakes Room. The hallway you walked through was the atrium. We're hearing obviously in just a moment from Mary Ellen Iskudarian and following her address, we'll be holding an opening reception in the atrium that is open to everyone. Tomorrow morning we'll spend most of the day in the auditorium called Forum Hall. Jen Tesher from the Financial Health Network will get us started and we'll have a full day of four different panels about central bank approaches to financial inclusion. At the end of each keynote or panel conversation, if there's time to do so, we're gonna be opening the floor to questions. Look out for the mic runners and please do use the mics because we'll be both video recording and live streaming this conference as we are now and the people watching online want to hear too. Hello to our online viewers already. Before we get to introductions of our keynote speaker, we'd like to thank a number of people who are making this event possible. Our collaborators in this larger venture, Michael Wiegand, Chris Galabia, Hamantru Nagpal and Calwell Singh of the Bale and Melinda Gates Foundation. Our co-sponsors, the Ford School of Public Policy and the Ross School's Business Plus Impact. Our student group co-sponsors, Domestic Policy Corps in Michigan FinTech and of course all of you, our speakers and participants today. We'd also like to thank the CFLP staff, Christy Bear and Tracy Van Dusen who you've all had great interactions with and helping us all get here and arrive safely and in one piece. Kelly Brown, Laura Lee, Chris Myers, Eric Van DeVenter of the Ford School, Hailey Phillips, Kat Johnson, Glenn Bugalov of the Impact Studio and Business Plus Impact and all of the Center on Finance, Law and Policies RAs who you've seen throughout the conference and have been helping you along your journey as well. But especially our designers, Jay Campbell, Julia Lauer and Elizabeth Felderberger and our core research team, Ashton, Jennifer, Callie, Cole, Lucas, Karin and Michael. And now let me begin our formal part of the day by introducing our wonderful keynote speaker for the afternoon, Mary Ellen Eskindarian. Mary Ellen is president and CEO of Women's World Banking, the global nonprofit devoted to giving more low income women access to the financial tools and resources they require to achieve security and prosperity. Mary Ellen joined Women's World Banking in 2006 and leads the Women's World Banking Global Team based in New York. She also serves as a member of the investment committee of its Impact Fund. Prior to joining Women's World Banking, Mary Ellen worked for 17 years at the International Finance Corporation and Arm of the World Bank. Before that, she worked for the investment bank Lehman Brothers. Mary Ellen is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a member of the Women's Forum of New York and the Business and Sustainable Development Commission. She holds an MBA from the Yale School of Management and a Bachelor of Science in International Economics from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. Please welcome me in joining Mary Ellen. Good afternoon. It's really wonderful to be with you today, even though it's a little rainy out there. Thank you to Michael and Adrienne for inviting me to address such a distinguished audience of governors, deputy governors, former governors and other luminaries. I'd also like to acknowledge the long hours, hard work and attention to detail that Christy Baer, Tracy Van Dusen and Ashton Smith have invested in making this event a reality. We certainly are living in interesting times, aren't we? Globally, we're seeing big systemic shifts taking place at an unbelievably rapid pace. Am I echoing a bit here? Do you wanna fix this or should I keep going? Let's see if that's any better. A little bit? Yeah, great, thank you for your patience. Climate change is literally reshaping the world around us. Political institutions and systems are being challenged in ways few of us ever anticipated. The way we live, work and engage with each other has been fundamentally changed by the role of digital technology over the past few decades. In many ways, this is a particularly volatile and uncertain time and we all have a vested interest in considering how we can shape the future to hold a more stable, resilient and equitable world. These shifts have also resulted in significant changes in the role each of you play as regulator, standard setter and policy maker. You and your central bank colleagues around the globe have recognized that the oversight of monetary policy payments and financial institutions is not only critical for the integrity and stability of our financial systems, but is also essential in promoting sustainable and inclusive growth and the building of economies that work for all. In fact, the very concept of stability has been reevaluated in the last decade as regulators have questioned just how stable a financial system can actually be if 80% of a country's financial transactions take place outside that system. Many of you have been in the forefront of the drive toward greater financial inclusion and your hard work has really paid off. In recent years, we've seen great strides in increasing financial access throughout the developing world. According to the World Bank's Global Findex, 1.2 billion adults have obtained a financial services account since 2011, including $515 million just since 2014. Between 2014 and 2017, the share of adults who have an account with a financial institution or through a mobile money service rose globally from 62% to 69%. It's clear that the tremendous advances in digital financial services are behind a lot of that progress. But despite these advances, there remain some truly profound gaps in providing access to even the most basic financial services to those who need them most. Many of you will be familiar with another statistic from the 2017 Findex that 1.7 billion people around the world are still unbanked. But what some of you may be less familiar with and I'd argue we should all be paying more attention to is the fact that the majority of these unbanked adults, nearly a billion of them, are women. In looking at the conference agenda for the next day and a half, I see that you'll be tackling many of the issues that drive financial inclusion, data, technology, innovation. And these are the same things that are at the heart of central banking. I have a request for you though as you approach these discussions. Stop for a moment and think about how each of these issues might impact women differently than they do men. I am absolutely certain that none of you would ever explicitly design a discriminatory regulation and that you undoubtedly have no intention of imposing policies that affect women and men differently. But the truth of the matter is that policy is not gender blind. Closing the gender gap in financial inclusion will require central bankers and other policy makers who were sensitive to the differences in men's and women's experience with the financial system and in the broader economy. And as you begin to apply this gender lens to various policy approaches, there are a few specific issues that can have a disproportionate effect on women. And today I'd like to address three of them with you. First, let's talk about numbers and data. Central banks and financial regulators are among the most data-driven institutions in the public sector. But few really drill down into the data to understand how women may be experiencing financial services and broader economic trends differently from men. As I'll discuss, to promote policy reforms that nurture a more inclusive financial system and a more inclusive economy, it will be important for central banks and regulators to gather and analyze gender-disaggregated data. Second, I'd like to explore some of the links between financial stability, which is what many central banks tend to emphasize through their regulations, and financial inclusion. Financial institution regulation has traditionally focused on promoting the safety and soundness of individual firms so that collectively, the financial system can remain stable. But is there room in regulation to consider whether that financial system includes everyone, and especially women? Research indicates that when women have access to appropriate financial tools, health and education outcomes for their family members, especially that of their children, improves. And these outcomes strike me as the things that could be critical to promoting sustainable and inclusive growth in an economy, which is an increasingly relevant goal among many central banks. As my third focus, I'd like to discuss with you some of the practical things that central bankers, regulators, standard centers, and other policy makers as well as industry can do to ensure that women are able to participate in the formal financial system. Here I'd like to emphasize the specific products and services that may best serve the needs of women, especially those in developing countries. I'll share some of the results of Women's World Banking's field research and initiatives in this area. With regard to these three areas of focus, sex disaggregated data, regulation that promotes stability and inclusion, and appropriate products that serve the needs of women, I'd like to challenge all of you to bear these topics in mind during our discussions here in Ann Arbor as we consider what the central bank of the future might look like and how we might promote a more inclusive financial system that can be a pillar of a more inclusive and sustainable economy. So first and foremost, let's begin with data. I want to stress the urgent need for financial service providers to report and for central banks and regulators to collect gender disaggregated financial data. We cannot move the needle on financial inclusion, let alone reach that 1.7 billion unbanked adults without knowing who they are and designing targeted strategies to reach them. Banks will never realize the markets they're overlooking unless they truly know whom they're serving. And mobile network operators are no better. More than half of the telcos offering mobile wallets today do not disaggregate their customer data. And for the academics in the room, you're not off the hook either. The basic unit of academic research still remains the household, but we know that not every member of that household shares the same experience. But data collection can't be an end in itself. It must be used to further policy goals. Let's take a look at the experience of Chile, the only country that has consistently collected sex disaggregated financial data for more than a decade. The quality and depth of financial reporting and the banking superintendent gets 100% compliance from the banks in Chile on their entire disaggregated data set, has allowed the government to implement a range of policy initiatives more effectively. Notably, they're finding that women held a higher percentage of housing loans while men held more consumer loans and that women were better repairs, greatly influenced the design of a highly successful affordable housing scheme. Today, women's make up 62% of that program's account holders and women-headed households have been particular beneficiaries. We've been heartened in recent years by the growing attention to the need for more and better data, including the IMF's decision to require gender disaggregated data in its annual financial access survey, but we need to do more. A second area for your consideration relates directly to your core mission as regulators, implementing sound regulatory policy to ensure financial stability. While the IMF has been cautious about endorsing the macroeconomic benefits of financial inclusion, they have very clearly stated that in developing countries, increased account ownership and saving at a formal financial institution can significantly affect macroeconomic stability, particularly in times of financial stress. The question I'd like to pose today is whether there's room in regulatory policy to consider not just financial and economic stability, but also financial and economic inclusion. In this regard, the benefits of bringing more women into the formal financial system and providing them access to the full complement of financial services that they need cannot be overstated from either a financial or an economic perspective. Literally mountains of research clearly demonstrate that women spend a greater percentage of the financial resources under their control on education, healthcare, nutrition, water and sanitation, really all the elements of the sustainable development goals. To quote just one of the myriad pieces of research on this topic, a study in China demonstrated that for every 10% increase in financial resources under a woman's control, there was a 1% increase in the rate of survival of girls in the household and significantly improved educational outcomes for both boys and girls in that household. But a similar 10% increase in men's income resulted in reduced rates of survival and educational outcomes for girls and no change in outcomes at all for boys. These gains in health outcomes for girls and in the educational outcomes for both girls and boys show that everyone wins when women control over financial, when women's control over financial resources increases. And that's a wonderful outcome for policy makers to pursue in general, but financial regulators and central bankers in particular should consider these outcomes as aligned with their focus on financial and economic stability and growth. While more research is necessary to quantify the impact of these improved outcomes on economic growth, I'd argue that healthier and better educated people are probably better positioned to participate more fully in the economy than people who are less healthy and less educated. Over the next day and a half, you'll consider the ways in which the central bank of the future can promote more inclusive economies. So I'd ask you to also bear in mind the long-established positive links between gender equality and a country's per capita GDP, its level of competitiveness, its expenditures on school enrollment, and a range of other human development indicators. Likewise, gender inequality is associated with an increase in income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient of up to 10 points. If we accept that financial inclusion can be a driver of gender equality, how can central bankers and regulators improve women's access to appropriate financial services? And which services are most important to women? This brings me to my third area of focus, namely the products and services that are most helpful to women's financial inclusion. Women's World Banking's field work, along with numerous research studies and financial diary projects, indicate that savings products are the financial services most frequently requested by low-income women. Digital savings in particular present an opportunity to serve women's financial needs in ways that both informal and traditional formal financial services have been unable to do. Financial services delivered digitally can address physical and emotional barriers for women by offering better services at lower cost. Digital savings accounts can enable women to save as frequently as possible, even in very small amounts, and women clients already save. Whether digital savings may or may not enable them to save more is unclear, but it can keep that woman's savings intact, directed towards concrete goals, and also gives her access to funds in case of emergency. Perhaps the best way to show you the importance of savings to low-income women is to let the women tell you themselves. We're gonna play a little video here. Thank you. Technology can bring financial services closer to women. Mobile phones and banking agents can reduce the risk, the cost, and the distance of financial transactions for women. Women face a number of barriers in their access to financial services. They often have limited mobility and an ability to leave the home. In Manawi, women are mostly breadwinners. They have got a lot of responsibilities. They have to do some businesses, do household work at the same time. So we looked at that and said they do not really have much time to go out to where our service centers are, which is normally quite a distance. So in order to save the money and time, we developed this product, which is being distributed to the customers through what we call agents. And these agents are located within the vicinity of where these people live, such that they have to have a very small distance to get to the agent and do banking transactions. So my name is Samgwar and it's a male-born woman and I'm looking for a bank to help me provide education to the people who are with me where they intend to be. I have successfully found a state thatronics money in my bank account, provided that there is no transaction for the rest of the children. In the banking service center, now I've all been this way Technology is allowing financial service providers to bring their services directly to the woman. We're seeing great success with digital tools in terms of in-field account opening, doorstep service collection, and we're now starting to see partnerships where existing informal savings groups are partnering with banks to bring more women into the formal financial system. Building financial services represent a huge opportunity to close the gender gap in financial inclusion. That's better system for us, that saves us from losing our money from people that we don't know, but this one, you get it right into your phone, wow, interesting. It's clearly cheaper, it's clearly more flexible, and digital helps you track, so it gives you history, so like a footprint of the customer, and it helps you refine your products, you know, better than physical would ever do. We've seen a real shift at women's world banking in that today almost all of the projects that we're engaged in have some digital component because we really believe that digital financial services can be the key to closing the gender gap in financial inclusion. I always love an excuse to watch that video, yeah, I think, yeah, why don't we do a round of applause. Partly to see Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria Aisha Ahmed, who's here with us today advocating for women's financial inclusion back in her former life as a banker, and partly to see Nwakpa, that woman at the end of the video with a particularly electric smile. I was fortunate enough to meet Nwakpa a few years ago in Lagos. She runs a busy fruit stall in an open market, open-air market there. She tried to save for years so that she could expand her business into a bigger fruit stall, but she struggled to have enough money left at the end of the month to pay her children's school fees, which was her absolute top priority, let alone invest in her business. Nwakpa told us she needed a safe place to save that had three important characteristics. It had to be convenient because she didn't have time to leave her business to go stand in line at a bank branch. It had to be confidential because she didn't want her husband or her neighbors knowing how much she'd saved or what she was saving for, and it had to be more secure than carrying cash from her shop to her home to hide under her mattress. But Nwakpa also talked about a kind of emotional distance from the bank when she said that she didn't think a bank would be for her, since she doubted she would be treated with dignity and respect by the branch staff. So it was very fortuitous that Diamond Bank, the fourth largest corporate bank in Nigeria at the time, made the strategic decision to move into the retail market and saw the competitive opportunity in expanding their presence to low-income clients through digital financial services. Diamond Bank came to Women's World Banking to understand and reach potential clients like Nwakpa. So together we designed a savings account called BETA that offered all of the benefits of confidentiality and security that Nwakpa was looking for, as well as convenience, since as you heard her say, transactions could be managed through her cell phone. We also addressed that emotional distance that she and so many other women had told us about by creating a group of account officers called BETA friends that visited Diamond customers' businesses to help them open accounts and provide some basic financial education. Within three years' time, over 600,000 BETA accounts were opened. And while the original expectation was that the BETA friends would simply get the customers started on their journey and would be quickly replaced by cell phone transactions, the friends soon emerged as the preferred savings channel, mobilizing close to 70% of BETA account deposits. This balance of technology and the human touch were essential to building trust and reinforcing savings behavior. This outcome and the introduction of the BETA product were made possible by regulators at the Central Bank of Nigeria who realized that women like Nwakpa were being excluded from the financial system by the cumbersome and complex layers of know-your-customer or KYC documentation that had traditionally been necessary to apply for a bank account. Now make no mistake, KYC and customer due diligence remain an important part of the customer onboarding process. Regulators and bankers alike seek to prevent abuse of the financial system and deter the laundering of ill-gotten gains through financial accounts by requiring customers to identify themselves upon opening an account. Nevertheless, excessively stringent customer due diligence requirements can exclude a woman like Nwakpa from the financial system simply because she lacks the full suite of identification documentation that might otherwise be required. Given that her account balances and transactions are likely to remain low in value and therefore most likely will not involve money laundering activities, regulators and standard-setting bodies have recognized that institutions can risk adjust their KYC requirements in such cases to reflect the lower level of money laundering or terrorist financing risk that's anticipated with such account holders. Nigeria was one of the first markets to introduce what is often called tiered KYC, requiring customers with lower value balances like Nwakpa to provide only basic information like their name, address, gender, telephone number and place and date of birth to be able to use a bank account. That innovation of simplifying the KYC requirements for lower-risk customers was a critical advancement for financial inclusion in Nigeria. There may be other standards where a risk-adjusted approach may make sense to help expand access to financial services among women, the poor, the unbanked and other marginalized groups. When drafting new regulations or when evaluating existing regulations, central bankers and regulators should consider whether those rules may unnecessarily impede access to financial services for women, where the risks to the financial system or the broader economy may be quite low. Some areas that come immediately to mind include the following. There are important changes that regulators can make to their country's credit infrastructure, namely through the establishment of credit and movable collateral registries that can help to close the $285 billion credit gap for women-led small businesses. Of the 189 economies surveyed by the World Bank's Women Business and the Law Report, 50 have neither a public credit registry nor a private credit bureau that serves more than 5% of the adult population. And where registries do exist, they typically cover only large balanced loans, effectively depriving women business owners of the opportunity to build credit histories. In addition, the introduction of movable collateral registries can be a boon for increasing women's access to capital. Women are far less likely and in some countries even legally prevented from owning land or built property. Enabling financial service providers to underwrite loans using movable assets like machinery, equipment, livestock, crops, inventory, even receivables as collateral can be a game changer for women small business owners. Regulators also must address the very real problem of account dormancy. Those impressive financial inclusion gains I cited from the Global Findex a few moments ago, they simply reflect account openings and they define an active account as one that merely has a single transaction in the preceding 12 months. That's hardly what any of us would consider active customer engagement. In India, for example, where we've seen huge progress in the opening of new accounts has over 55% of accounts held by women as dormant. This high rate of dormancy speaks to the need to create products that meet women's needs and are relevant to their lives. Women don't want and are unlikely to engage with pink products. Rather, they want products that reflect the convenience, confidentiality, and security that Nwakpa mentioned. And they also want financial service providers to understand their need for flexibility, particularly if they are working in the informal sector and have irregular incomes. And one last broad area where significant work remains is in the area of identity. Women who lack appropriate identity documentation may be unable to open accounts or even to purchase a SIM card for their mobile phone. According to the World Bank's ID for Development program, 45% of women lack identity in lower and even middle income countries. In some countries, live births of girls aren't even registered. While central banks are generally not the authority that oversees identity policy, central bankers could become powerful advocates for expanding access to identity for women because it is one of the biggest impediments to their participation in the financial system and consequently in the formal economy. So I've now shared with you the three areas where I'd really like to challenge all of you to bring a gender lens to your discussions today and tomorrow as you think about the risks and opportunities that the central bank of the future may face, especially when promoting financial inclusion. First, as some of the most data-driven public institutions, central banks and financial regulators must do a better job collecting and analyzing data in order to understand how women are and are not being served by the financial sector. To build a more inclusive financial system and a more inclusive economy, central banks need to consider the impact that policy reforms can have on all citizens and where women's experience might be quite different from those of men. Second, when drafting new regulations or evaluating existing ones, I urge central bankers and financial regulators to consider whether regulations could help to promote financial inclusion as well as financial stability, or at the very least, whether regulations should not serve as an unnecessary deterrent to inclusion and especially to the inclusion of women who constitute the vast majority of the unbanked today. And then third, when seeking to promote women's financial inclusion, central bankers, regulators, and industry need to consider what products and services are most important to addressing the needs of women in developing countries. While some work has already been done on savings products, more work is ahead to close the credit gap for women and to address the unintended consequences in product-related regulations such as the treatment of dormant accounts, collateral, and even that broader issue of identity. How can we prepare central banks and financial regulators to address these areas of focus with a gender lens as they build the central bank of the future? Studies have shown that the greater the focus on diversity and gender parity within regulatory institutions, the greater the emphasis on women as clients and as leaders within the financial institutions they oversee. What's more, there's a growing body of research, like the IMF's Banking on Women Leaders Study led by Ratna Sahai, suggesting that higher shares of women on the boards of banking supervision agencies is associated with greater bank stability. We know that diversity drives better decision making. In fact, failing to have a variety of profiles and perspectives around the table as well as having gender parity leads to riskier decisions and weaker institutions. That's why this year Women's World Banking launched our first leadership and diversity for regulators program. It's a global offering designed in partnership with the Alliance for Financial Inclusion and taught by Women's World Banking and faculty members from Oxford University's Said Business School. The course brings together senior officials from central banks and other regulatory agencies, together with high potential women from those respective institutions in a nine month leadership program. Each senior official identifies a policy initiative to sponsor at their institution that's related to serving the women's market and then works with the high potential woman leader to implement that initiative while simultaneously supporting her professional development during and after the program. For instance, in this year's program, the Central Bank of Egypt has worked to develop a clear plan to promote women's economic empowerment. And I'm delighted to see Deputy Governor Lobna Halal in the audience today. Their strategy is quite comprehensive. It includes initiatives to measure the levels of women's representation across various sectors, review gender-based pay gaps, conduct unconscious gender bias training, and initiate support programs to build female talent pipelines across the banking sector. Another example comes from the Central Bank of Rwanda, where they also developed an impressive strategy to advance women's financial inclusion by using digital financial services to accelerate the formal financial inclusion of traditional smart savings groups, by using digital technology to map stakeholders and facilitate data collection, the Central Bank plans to financially include 220,000 women in formal financial institutions in the coming year. I find these initiatives particularly exciting and inspiring, because we're seeing these Central Banks challenging themselves to think more expansively about their mandate to drive inclusion beyond the narrow confines of regulation. From Egypt looking to drive behavior change in the entire sector that they're regulating, to Rwanda looking to bring traditional savings groups into the digital world in collaboration with the private sector. When Central Banks, financial regulators, standard setters, and industry focus on these three areas, gender disaggregated data, regulations that promote financial stability and inclusion, and products and services appropriate for women, what can we realistically expect as outcomes. I'd suggest that we ask Noaqa, the Nigerian fruit seller, to serve as an inspiration for us. She was once a merchant struggling to earn a living wage and pay for her children's school fees. But thanks to the foresight of local regulators who recognized that some of their own regulations were unnecessarily excluding unbanked individuals such as Noaqa. And thanks to the innovations of financial service providers who were willing to re-evaluate their product offerings and develop more appropriate tools for potential customers like Wakpa, she is literally a changed woman today. She went from believing that banks had no interest in her business prospects to becoming an active saver in a bank. She expresses great pride in her financial accomplishments and she's quick to encourage her friends and families to open their own beta accounts. Her savings helped her to expand her business such that she's now looking for that larger stall in a busier part of the market. Her growing success enabled her to pay those school fees that she once found so daunting, so much so that all of her children are finishing their secondary schooling with plans to attend university. Something that Wakpa who had only minimal schooling herself never imagined might be possible for all of her kids. Countless women like Wakpa around the world are doing their best to provide for their families with limited or no access to financial services today. Let's do our part to make sure that they can improve their ability to save, to borrow and to conduct payments efficiently and safely. Let's help them create their own means to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. Let's empower them to participate more fully in the formal economy and in broader society. The central bank of the future has a stake in these women, just as these women have a stake in the central bank of the future. Thank you so much for your attention. I know I am the thing standing between you and that cocktail party, but if you'd like to ask some questions I'd be delighted to continue the conversation. Thank you so much. I think that drink is looking pretty good. Is that better? Hi, I'm Brian Ricketts. I'm a current public policy and business student here at the University. I just want to thank you for being here. Thank you. I wanted to ask if you'd seen banks who were working to be more inclusive on the consumer-facing side and they've got these deposits, do you also see those same impacts on what they do on those deposits? It's a really great question. In fact, if anything, we find it easier to sell banks on the credit opportunity than we do on the savings opportunity, so we've become very big proponents of bundling product opportunities because, as I mentioned, the women really do want that safe place to save, but the banks want to make money by lending to them, so that bundling can really make all the difference. I'm wondering if you could give us some advice about how to engage, mobilize, energize people on the ground to get involved in a conversation about the central bank of the future. In your experience, what is it, is there a way to translate people's real lived need for better financial services into mobilization for change? Well, I think the fact that you've been able to bring so many regulators from developing economies to this venue and this conference says a lot about the excitement, and certainly our regulator's program, we were just blown away by the enthusiasm. I think there's a tremendous desire to reach those who are unreached. There's a very keen understanding of last-mile issues I've found amongst the regulators that we talk to. So I do think that raising awareness is probably the single best thing that we can do. Making it clear that this is a market that can be served, that these are valuable customers who are, you know, just in terms of the sheer scale of serving them, can make a very, very important difference to the financial system. That's, I'd say that's really our experience is just making making the awareness. And we're not the only ones doing that, obviously. The Global Findex and many of you in the room have been big contributors there. But at least our experience is when the regulators are aware of the scale of the issue, they're eager to join in the conversation. Thank you very much, Marielle. Oh, thank you. For that very inspiring keynote, I took a lot of notes to remind myself of the past life, you know, the things we need to think about. Most of the examples here have to do with how Women's World Banking is working with banks, traditional banks. Part of the conversations we had at the Close Door meetings were looking at some of these other participants that are not traditional financial institutions. Can you speak a bit at all about what Women's World Banking is doing with these alternative, should I say, service providers that are not traditional banks where you see an opportunity for them to, you know, take financial inclusion further because perhaps what we are seeing in the high dormancy rate may be a dissatisfaction with what the traditional offering is. And also what you think policymakers and how policymakers can connect with these other providers the same way in some of these examples you had to have the central banks and the financial providers come up with innovative solutions how can we then take that further to these non-traditional financial service providers? That's a really great question and we're only just starting to work with some of these newer providers but one thing that's been really interesting and actually we're seeing this maybe a little bit more on our impact investment fund than we are in the NGO activities we've seen this sort of trend where fintechs who are sort of in their series B round coming to us saying we never, we didn't plan to have a majority of women clients but when we look at whose, you know, alternative credit scoring model companies alternative lending platforms peer-to-peer lending platforms have been terrific for women in a lot of the countries we work in and the entrepreneurs who are setting up the company and now we're trying to raise a second round of funding are realizing that's who they're banking. Now we have real concerns about digital credit and the consumer protection issues around that and that's been another really important part of our dialogue with those companies and where I think regulatory bodies absolutely have to stay focused I mean women's world banking had its origins in the micro finance industry and I fear that some of what's going on in digital credit today is worse than anything we saw in the micro finance industry in terms of over indebtedness and interest rates and and now frankly NPLs for those institutions so I think that there is huge possibility particularly for women if you know we've seen in some of the pay as you go solar businesses now really looking much more like financial service companies and we've been advising a few of them about their offerings you know once that woman has that asset of the solar lamp that she's been making payments diligently for and some of the pay as you go energy companies are reporting to credit bureaus to allow those women to build credit histories they're starting to make loans with the solar lamps as collateral interestingly one of them came to us recently and said the men all want to borrow for television sets the women all want agricultural inputs and education loans so you know some things never change but I think there's just a huge opportunity there for those but I'd say making sure that people are protected that the digital literacy is there as well as the financial literacy and the consumer protection is in place it'd be I'd say job one I'm seeing the rapid up sign here from Christy, thank you all very much, thank you