 This week, world leaders gathered at the United Nations to discuss a wide range of issues facing the global community. Among them was financial inclusion, giving universal access to the services that provide growth and prosperity. My colleague Cathy Kay and I caught up with two key players in that effort at the Bloomberg Global Business Forum. First, here's her interview with Queen Maxima of the Netherlands, who's worked as a UN special advocate. Cathy started by asking how she became involved with this issue. I think that when I was 14 years old, I was living in Argentina, living in quite a hyperinflation environment, and realized that for people to really become economically included and being able to participate in the economic environment, they just needed tools. One of the biggest tools is basically having credit to invest in opportunities, having savings that really will be maintained in time to actually be able to help you for your pension life or, you know, against unforeseen risks, the same goes for insurance, the same goes to even making payments. And we're seeing the difference. We are seeing that when a woman actually gets credit in order to sort of, you know, invest in a livelihood and increase her income, it really makes a change, not in herself, in our family. When we see that people have savings, they have this mattress that they can actually fall back on to in case of unforeseen risks. So it's so important that people have this, you know, resilience and this potential to really invest in their future to actually improve their lives and that of their children. Who are the people who are not financially included? And you've mentioned women a few times. Does it always tend to be women? Is it the same people in different countries? I mean, can you spot a profile of a country and say, OK, these people will not have financial inclusion? Well, we're seeing from all the advancements that still a couple of groups are actually not doing that well. We still have a persistent gender gap of 9% of the emerging economies. So that means that women have grown, have more, have had more access to financial services, but in less rates than the men in that rate of growth, the poor and certainly the rural. So these three things, you know, we need to, these three groups will need to look into. And of course, there's big disparities among countries. As we move away from cash to credit in other forms on people's phones, for example, in a financial system that increasingly in developing countries does work on telephones. Does that help people who had been excluded before? Absolutely. Technology has really been a game changer in financial inclusion. I mean, we see in the last three years, growth has been mainly based on technology in your help. Still today, one billion people have a mobile phone, but they don't have financial services. So we have great potential in that front. So, yes, technology has helped us actually go into groups that we couldn't do it before in the old fashioned way. It also cuts off the gender bias. You know, a lot of women, you know, because they have, they make payments on their mobile phones. Basically, the companies that are, well, you know, they make payments, they juggle a lot of money. So therefore, they are sort of creating current history. You know, men or women, you know, they will actually have access to credit. So all these issues are really helping people, you know, be closer to markets, be closer to financial options and be even closer to making payments, which were before they had to sort of really travel long distances where they're stuck of cash to make a payment. And today they can do it from the safety of their home, increasing safety for, you know, women and increasing the potential of actually being economic active. Queen Maximus, thanks very much. Thank you. And I talked to Ajay Bunga, the CEO of Mastercard and asked him what role corporations can play when it comes to financial inclusion. We discovered that our war wasn't cash. And cash, essentially, that's our business. And cash is not the friend of these folks who are excluded. And so one way to reach at cash was to also tackle the problem of exclusion. So this came to being like a good commercial logic for what made a lot of sense to do. That's how it started. So what we've gone after is to use technology, which is a great level of playing fields, combine that with some interesting partnerships, and both public sector partnerships, but also recently, with the Queen's help, CEO level partnerships in the private sector. And you cobble those that technology and those partnerships together, and you can start making a real difference to, to a number of people who are left out otherwise. So you talk about vision for a cashless society. What does that look like? Well, I don't think you'd ever go cashless, because I think cash has a role to play in its own fundamental form. What really it means is to reduce the level of cash in the economy from where it is today to a much lower level. So if you can reduce 85 to 50, the opposite side of that is greater transparency, greater revenue recognition, less corruption, less wastage, less leakage, all the things that cash can otherwise enable things to happen in a society. Let me give you one specific example of a challenge that you have in a country like India, where we've both lived and worked. Something like 2% of Indians have a credit card. Indians still like to keep cash. That's correct. How do you overcome that? It's a cultural issue. Well, that's correct. But it's not just my credit cards, because I'm not in the credit card business. I'm in the technology and infrastructure business. So you could use a debit card, a prepaid card, a phone, a fingerprint, your irises. I don't really bother about the form factor. I bother about the fact that it's electronic from some account to some account. That's what I really care. But there's still a challenge, even. It's still a big challenge. Although, as you can see, with mobile technology, with players coming into India, it's catching on. But yes, here are the issues with it. The first is that people have to have an identity. If they don't have an identity, you cannot open an account. India, actually, with its Aadhaar system, has attempted to democratize identities. There are ways of doing it better and quicker, and people can debate that, but they've done it. So that enables the opening of accounts. Once you've opened the account, we, in Mastercard of the Apartment, we've reached 360 million people in the last few years to open accounts with them. The problem is, it's not just enough to open the account. You're going to get money into it, and you're going to start beginning to use it as well. Once you do the usage, you start creating credit histories. You could become eligible for insurance. The kind of things that a number of countries are trying to do. And lastly, you talk about technology being one of the game-changers here. How can that eradicate corruption in some of the countries that you mentioned, where there is an issue? Technology creates transparency. So that's the biggest asset in fighting corruption. Corruption thrives when there's dark shadows. It doesn't thrive in open light. But it all finally comes out of jobs and quality of life. And if you can create the right jobs, then companies like ours benefit from people who have jobs ready. They will shop. When they shop, I'll benefit. Thank you very much. Pleasure to meet you.