 Hello everybody. Good morning, good evening, good afternoon. I hope you have a good lunchtime or a good night depending on where you are all over the world. We had more than 175 registrations for today's talk and we are very happy that the topic seems to be very interesting for all of you. So my name is Martin Ietsche. I'm your host, well, not your host. I would say you're moderator tonight. To my left or right, depending on your view, you have Norbert Gerger, he is our presenter tonight and you have Sergei and Sergei is from UPU and I would like to give over for him to a short welcome from UPU to our tonight's session or to today's session depending on where you are. Well, it's always hard in these international courts to get the right time for everybody. So, Sergei, up to you. Yeah, thank you Martin. Good afternoon, good morning, well, good evening as Martin said to everybody and I'm really happy to welcome all of you to this first webinar in our series. This is actually joint initiative of the newly created postal payment services user group and well that consists of two former groups post transfer and PPS clearing and the international viewer itself. We do plan to have at least three of the of the webinars in the coming months and the rest will depend really on your interest and involvement because then if you are happy and there is a strong demand for more, we can proceed. As for, well, introductory remarks, let me say a few words of the post transfer itself and the posts in the which I active in the postal payment services market and well post all over the world, they are really recognized as trusted public service providers. They have a global network and they have best partners in the delivery of accessible and affordable financial services and when we are talking about financial services, that's of course social payments and remittances and what those do is really, really crucial for the end bank populations especially. UPU itself is constantly assisting member countries in this area of financial services development and that results in building a worldwide electronic postal payments network and this network is based on the legal framework in the form of the UPU international treaty, well it's called the postal payment services agreement and its regulations and of course well furthermore the electronic postal payments network and that trademark or the recognized brand post transfer are really useful tools that allow postal operators to provide modern money transfer service. The adoption of this brand of the post transfer can facilitate the commercial position in all the transfers in the global remittances market under one single trusted brand. It can also help to reinforce business as well as the role of the post itself in fostering financial inclusion. That will really bring a so much needed market visibility to the international postal payment service and will help customers to make them aware of the state of the art technology and high quality standards that really underpin provision of such service. The objective of this webinar and I hope that Norbert will talk much more than I is really to provide you guys with some thoughts on present and future trends and developments and with that to incentive further improvement of payment services. I hope that we will all get some insights on what types of payments are emerging now on the market and of course what our customers needs nowadays from our side that the UPU will see how post transfer service can and already respond to those needs. So with that Martin I hand it over back to you and them to Norbert. Thanks Sergei for that introduction and especially thanks to you and your group to make this talk possible because you're the one who is giving this all to all of us so thanks to you and thanks a lot. So we will switch over to Norbert now and first of all let me before we start the presentation if you want to advice some of you ask whether there will be a Spanish or French French or other translation no sorry about that this one is just English but I'm quite sure that all of you should be able to follow the presentation. The second one I'm seeing already a lot of greetings from all over the world so let's let me start with Bhutan and Suriname and Brussels and Chile and South Sudan, South Africa, Bermuda, Turkey, Argentina, Peru, Nigeria, Montenegro and so on. I probably, Aruba is there as well I would like to be on Aruba now because it's snowing here so Aruba might be nice. So thanks a lot for all that greetings and it's great that some of you already found the chat. Whenever you have a question please put it in the chat and we will be able to answer these questions maybe sometimes while the presentation goes on so we have several questions section there or after the presentation so if you have any questions on what Norbert is telling you we will be able to answer all of these questions afterwards. So that is Norbert now. So Norbert Gargate is the founder and representative director of Tokyo FinTech. He is an investor and advisor for several FinTech companies in Japan and all over the world with a focus on strategy and operations as well of course the Asia market entry. I know Norbert now for about let me think about 30 years and he spent most of his career in capital markets. He was managing director in Goldman Sachs Technology Division, he was at Barclays Investment Bank and for some time he was a consultant also. So I think if we need somebody who can give us some some overview on what is going on in payment markets there are probably not a lot of people who can do this in a way Norbert can do that and beside of that and that's something which I personally find very interesting for an international audience like this. He lived, well he was born in Europe, he lived in Europe in UK and Germany for some time but he lived as well in the US and New York. He lived in Japan for a lot of time to say something private, he has his family in Japan as well so he is a very international person and I think for an international audience like this this combination from a worldwide view and a lot of experience of the payment marketing is something we cannot get better than with Norbert. So saying that I will give over to Norbert now and Norbert the presentation is up to you, the stage is yours. We are now up to a hundred attendees and well the microphone is yours and let's have a lot of fun all of us. Wonderful, thank you for the introduction Martin and Sage. Thank you all for taking the time, it's a pleasure to be here and I do love talking about these topics. So I saw the comments unfortunately both my French and my Spanish are very bad. I could do the presentation in Japanese or German and because I do that most of the slides I'm using actually won't have text on them so you'll see lots of pictures. Hopefully you have some enjoyment listening to me and it's going to be a wild ride. So I as Martin said I wear many different hats for the purposes of this presentation. I'm the founder of Tokyo Fintech which is a community of about 3,300 people and our purpose is to educate and bring innovation to Japan. We also have communities in Seoul and in Berlin. Naturally over the last year these have all become much more virtual so if you are so inclined and you want to be part of that you can find them on meetup.com and join them for free. We do have events regularly. Before I get into the meat of the presentation the most important person in my life and that is my lawyer will insist on me making a few comments. The first one is that I will absolutely comment either in the presentation or in the Q&A on the situation of a public company or as soon to be public company or the valuation of a private company. All these comments are my own opinions and since I've worked for myself they also my employer's opinions but by no means they are investment advice and you should do your own research. Secondly obviously we live in an age where information abundance is all around us and I don't think anything I'll present today and that's never been my job will be particularly new. I've built a career based on crystallizing essential information and positioning in a way that allows for management action and strategic decisions but if you spend enough time googling and reading and I spend probably half my day every day trying to keep up with what is going on in the overall fintech space then much of what you hear here today you will find you won't find it necessarily distilled in a one-hour presentation. Thirdly and last I'll do this because I have lots of fun talking about these topics. This is my eighth of these presentations this year I think that makes it about two per week. I'm not getting compensated for this so if you do like the presentation you can do me a favor and mention it to somebody else and if you don't like it then please come back to me and with some constructive criticism because always happy to learn. So we got this out of the way fantastic let's get into the topic itself. If I had four hours of your time I could talk about payments for four hours but I might use one hour each on the following topics and one is payments which we covered today. A blockchain would be the second one or distributed ledger technology that leads us to cryptocurrencies and then to central bank digital currencies. So the focus of today's discussion will be on the payments topic. I will with some examples touch very lightly on cryptocurrencies or a flavor of CDBCs but this will by no means be the full discussion and as I said these will lend themselves to a whole another hour of discussion. So as we put in the title our premise is that the marginal cost of any digital transaction will be zero and to a large extent it is actually already zero and the examples that we have are all around us especially with the background of UTU. We don't have to necessarily go through this in detail right. Email is free we've got the subscription for the internet service and there's this cartoon where 20 years ago you were happy you got this email right we all got the if you're old enough you know the ALS screen that says like you've got mail and never quite happy when we actually get a physical letter so this has become free. Phone calls my girlfriend used to be in Korea and I paid about three Deutschmarks at the time per minute in phone calls today voice over IP is free voice is digitized and becomes data and again it's a transaction that's free. Now the funny thing about some of these parts of the presentations I'm going to go through is that I use certain examples for two years probably and I think the news flow has been very favorable for me the recently so we'll hit on a few topics that just made the headlines over the last few weeks although we've been talking about them for a long time and hopefully some of the crazy ideas that I'm going to throw at you will see coming to fruition in another two years time. So one of the crazy things where the price has gone to zero is also securities trading and Robin Hood which if you followed the market news over the last few weeks has been totally in the news because of bubbles and short squeezes etc but Robin Hood has changed an entire industry that really hasn't seen much change since the arrival of the discount brokers and now you've got free stock trading in the US you've got eight securities in Hong Kong that got acquired by so far and we've got SPI here in Japan starting to allow free shares trading as well so again it's a digital transaction that the price is zero and so if you're looking at payments now right what is the difference between sending an email and sending in payment and obviously Google tried this a while ago that you can just attach money to your email as well or to your chat and the answer is there isn't a difference so there will simply be a price of zero attached to that and we need to deal with that so naturally the question is how do we make money then well first answer is that what is somebody's business is somebody else's customer acquisition cost and especially if you look at China but also if you look at the neo banks in Europe payments are free because they are essentially the customer acquisition cost so I'll get you on to the platform and then I'm trying to cross sell you into an ecosystem especially if you look at WeChat you look at and financial right you you have a money market fund you can buy insurance you can trade stocks and and all these things that ultimately generate money but then again the payment itself is free and hopefully and the question is one of are we in a bubble are we not in a bubble as far as startups fintech right financing overall is concerned um the monetization question obviously is a challenging one and we've seen um especially in Australia I think are the recent examples we've seen one of the new banks fold and we've seen another one being acquired by NAB it's probably something that you're going to see more of also in in other markets but it's nice to get folks on your platform right and the the user numbers are always communicated which reminds me a bit of the the clicks and the eyeballs of the internet bubble but are these actually able to monetize the flow um so big question um the the second approach to monetizing is to give people shiny new things and in this case it's a revolute metal credit card um which is positioned at marketed as a huge innovation and maybe if you're 20 years old and haven't been around credit cards for a long time it is my personal opinion here if you're interested is it's actually not innovative at all it uses obviously in this case existing mastercard payment rails and it uses a technology that is one of the two inventions of the banking industry over the last 70 years the other being the ATM and the ATM is on its way out and we're going to talk about that later a bit as well the sub model is that you have either subscriptions or you actually have the recipient of the payment pay for it and Sweden is a fantastic example for that because Sweden is probably as close to a cashless society as we can all imagine while Germany and Japan are at the bottom end of cashless adoption um so I would consider myself being a German living in Japan probably an aspect for cash rather than for cashless quite honestly um swish founded by the six biggest Swedish banks or the six Swedish banks in 2012 and everybody uses it payments are free I believe for retail consumers and the recipient of the fund pays a certain fee depending on the size plus possible and annual license fee as well so obviously subscription model premium services bundling etc works so that's the premise of what I want to talk about I will just continue running I don't assume that any questions at this point but otherwise Martin please interrupt me so in the next section we want to discuss if payments are free what is actually a payments company and that's actually a very simple question with a very difficult answer and the picture is really really fuzzy it's actually so fuzzy that even the German regulators don't know how to answer this and and hence the via card debacle but I want to take a few shots at that so obviously payments historically has been a banking function it's a space where we have quite a number of start-ups active and when you scale that you can actually have payments as a platform and and then it's ultimately I will talk about that if you look at it from a VC and private equity perspective right which I'm obviously with the start-ups I invested in and that I'm supporting quite heavily involved and if your startup today and payments is not part of your business plan you're missing out with your not achieving the valuation you're not achieving the the traction that you should so I'm going to run through a wide range of examples here I try to be geographically let's say equal I must admit that I've worked on every continent and build broker dealers and other infrastructure on every continent but Africa so that's a bit of a blind spot for me and I saw a few people joining from that continent so apologize it's not something I can talk knowledgeably about um the the other thing that you have around these four vectors let's say you obviously have an underlying infrastructure that's a national payment system so in the next section I will talk a bit about the role of governments and such infrastructure and payments with two examples and you have open banking on top of all of these that depending on the regulation and the jurisdiction you're in has the different shapes and forms um so let's start with the startups that seems to make lots of sense so the the challenge obviously is that we're moving tremendously fast so it doesn't take much you can take a basic amazon web services subscription and you can spin up your startup at 50 dollars right or the equivalent of whatever your currency is and you can scale it quite successfully or you can scale it quickly if you're successful and direct more users so long gone are the days where we had p2b payments right that is a bit like paypal in 2002 or so and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel can tell us that story um then the next feature was this bill split payment thing so when you go with the friends to your restaurant and that's table stakes today I'm personally never never used it though I I don't know but seems to be very popular right and then the the third generation is a personal financial manager right so if you don't have a pfm these days you really don't have a seat at the table either and this graphic specifically comes from Tink which again is a Nordic startup and and payments company they actually give you a software development kit and sdk and a skilled software engineer can stitch together right a basic pfm in about 30 minutes I'm not hands on in my programming skills anymore probably takes me four hours but the barriers to entry for this market are non-existent right so here you get it in half an hour for a pfm great stuff um next one also becomes table stakes a multi-currency account so here it's transfer wise which obviously is one of the unicorns the elephants in the room when it comes to international transfers as well you can have an account that has whatever 30 different currencies in there you can get the same from revolute you can get the same from sync and it's actually not very difficult to build it takes a bit longer than the 30 minutes of the pfm but many of these companies as the underlying infrastructure or the service provider use currency cloud which is a specialist for these and so if you build your functionality on currency cloud again you don't really have to do much yourself you are just api ing in so Stripe is the best payment company for startups and with the last fundraising round I think they reached 36 billion US dollars they actually aiming for about 100 without doing an IPO and they are covering every single aspect of payments these days and they're moving so fast oh this is my this is my Africa slide so we do have representation right so they have Stripe had a kind of blind spot in Africa as well so they spend about 200 million dollars on acquiring pay stack which is I think based in Nigeria originally and expanding now also with Stripes backing across the African continent so very exciting to see that I think in terms of payments in Africa as you can see many of the blockchain protocols cryptocurrency trying to take a step at unbanking the unbanked but here's really something that enables startups to offer payment services and so if you if you look at the Stripe customer list everybody is on Stripe and the mind-boggling thing is the one here right on top which is Shopify which has an insane valuation because obviously we're all doing e-commerce shopping while we're locked down and if you if you just take a simple look at the valuation the stock price of Shopify and the percentage of the payments related revenue right you see a clear correlation there I think yesterday the closed over 1200 somewhere near 1300 and you think they are an e-commerce website with 80 of the revenue coming from payments are they actually a payments company right and so and similar to Robinhood the product might not be what you think it is right the e-commerce transaction is just a trigger to actually get to the payment and now if you if you are a startup right you can work with Stripe and you can get revenue but if you let's say vertical startup for example you have software for gyms maybe not the best example during the pandemic but you have software for gyms and you're deployed in 5000 gyms across France or Costa Rica or whatever it might be then from a starting point of around 50 million US dollar and revenue it would actually make sense for you to insource your payments and you can do this there's companies like Phoenix that allow you basically to avoid building a technology team around payments and use their pre-built functionality but to take this in and avoid the charges that a Stripe or a square would would incur and so that's a sad 50 million so you need to be somewhat skilled already and then right a little bit of promotion here we do have a podcast Rails Bank is being built by one of the founders of currency cloud that I mentioned and they describe themselves as building an invisibility cloak for finance you can find this on our podcast which has been renamed and you get get another recommendation later on but again these are platforms that basically lend you their functionality so let's talk a bit about the the old starchy banks and I can probably talk a bit more knowledgeably around the economics and Asia we have depending on the market you look at but 40 to 70 percent of the bank's revenue actually comes from payments transactions and so when you look at the title we're talking about retail payments right so there's a it's an interesting separation going on between retail and corporate payments simply because the retail payments will be free and everything we talk about platforming on the retail side actually has happened to a certain extent already on the corporate merchant banking side where you have a treasury systems treasury support for organizations and you basically tied into the platform with additional services right whether it's the lending facilities working capital etc so it's not that between 40 and 70 percent of your revenue are at risk but a portion of that certainly comes at risk when you go to zero one point i wanted to highlight in terms of the the new banks between the european and the middle and south american approach so n26 is the the prominent german new bank with millions of customers klar is a mexican bank that good friends at maro capital which used to be sometimes their inoventures invested in and what you typically get and you get it with starling monzo etc also in in the uk you get it certainly with n26 in germany they have pretty much payments driven so they give you a current account they give you right the the ability to make payments because it's all free and and fintechs somehow have gotten the idea that they give their services away for free many people use it as a secondary account not as a primary account and in latin america the approach is much more loan driven lending driven and and that's the investment see this for maro into klar so they specifically pointed that out as a differentiator in terms of how the the markets work you obviously not not all banks are bad i think when when you look at these the structure that we have is the payment infrastructure on the bottom and open banking on the top you might have to fear that banks become dumb pipes and many of them certainly will but there's some very good examples of banks that either have always been digital like tinkoff and rusher and so you probably can talk much more about that than i can but it's a fantastic bank that is also building organically in an ecosystem while the competitor in russia is doing acquisitions we've got one later in the czech republic which i think is much more for transformation story and ak bank in turkey for example so these are examples when you look at digital banking acumen including payments these are banks that you would be looking at and then we've got the discussion around fintech tech fin right big tech going into the the financial markets and you've got the tie-up of google the city in the us so you get google accounts that are backed by city which i think is an amazing story because city obviously is a very old and starchy bank but they can work together at an accelerated pace so they certainly have done something right and they started that transformation um i would say probably eight or ten years ago so the end result of that is that they can have these alliances and then you have goldman sacks at mastercard which is a slightly different story because goldman sacks didn't have a retail business before we actually created the goldman sacks bank usa when we became a fat-regulated bank in the global financial crisis over a weekend together with morgan stanley and now 10 years later 12 years later it's being used for the consumer offering so there's a whole greenfield consumer business being built and together with apple here partnering on the on the card so which leads us to open banking and i always drive my friends nuts and you probably think i'm going crazy now but um i i do ask my insurance friends what are you doing about open banking and the the reason simply is that it's an asymmetrical playing field so psd2 as a regulation in europe consumer data rights cdr in australia and you have it in many other markets forces the banks to open their pipes and typically they're two trend two different licenses one is that you get access to account information and so it's an a isp account information service provider and then you've got payment initiations you've got a psp payment initiation service provider and basically you obviously become regulated you need to get a license and an approval but ultimately you can get access to the banking transaction data and if i was an insurance company and i've access to all the insurance data on my customers and i can get free access to additional financial information that gives me a full picture i would go after that but everybody thinks i'm nuts but i i do think that this one of the things that over the next two years you're actually going to see that and part of that will be market driven part of that will be regulatory driven because the cdr in australia is while it starts with the the payments and the banks it is actually across industry so will include insurance and utilities and telecom providers etc and the other movement that's very interesting at the end of last year in south korea the the regulators started to look at the fairness of these open data regulation and they've been publicly contemplating right in return for getting access to open banking data that the e-commerce companies would need to open up their order information right so that would be the equivalent of you getting and you're granting an app the right to read your amazon order history so i think that's an interesting trend we're going to see open banking data is free these days and so it's again like payments if you're in the payment business and that is just somebody else's customer acquisition cost that represents a challenge but if you're in the open banking business and you're providing open banking access and for somebody else that's the customer acquisition cost it's a similar interesting conundrum and nordigan which is in based on the Baltics they make the money by classifying transaction information right so they they identify whether it's for for food for car etc and they actually opened their they use an open banking to provide free access to this account information right it's always permission by the user of course i think you don't have to build the infrastructure you can use the infrastructure and obviously they're trying then to sell the categorization services on the back of that um very interesting example um i would love to talk much more about Bahrain where we spend this almost now it's 18 months ago probably Bahrain implemented open banking regulation within a 12 month period which is absolutely mind-boggling and Abdullah al-Mu'ayyad who's the gentleman second person on the right founder of tarahbud gateway it's been a driving force behind that um it was like six months of considerations and review of the regulation and then basically regulator said you banks need to be ready in six months time and so if you have the will to change and to open up um you can accomplish quite a lot and so it's a good example of what the regulator or the government can actually uh accomplish or how they can be a catalyst for that tremendous pace and i think said an example for the whole region and the the middle east northern african market is huge and it's a hugely young population that is underserved so i think it's a very exciting market to look at um i just keep talking martin um so i'm winding hopefully up very quickly um one point is on the the rule of government i want to give you two examples one is known as the india stack so india since 2009 and with the atar id system has built out a stack that now is leading to a true can be an explosion in the fintech and the payment space so you have what is called the upi unified payment interface which used to be charged for as they were building the infrastructure and it started in around 2015 16 i would say it became free um at some point over the last 12 18 months and uh the the interesting part around that is from a positioning perspective um again small promotion here for part does which we actually released only two two days ago um talking about the the overall indian payments landscape is that because there's such a great connectivity of the bank accounts now it is that people don't use mobile wallets anymore so me here here from pwc is an expert and uh you might enjoy this conversation uh it's now the tokyo fintech podcast is now the exponential finance podcast this is brand new i put it out on tuesday uh the second example of the government is kambodia uh where we have project bakon which is a central bank digital currency um it is based on suramitsu which is a japanese company which contributed their blockchain technology i roll hard to hyper lecture and so this is the only time where i give you a blockchain example and it's a it's a fascinating story for a number of reasons simply because kambodia for the longest time had the us dollar as a black market parallel currency um they had to really spend about 10 years to stabilize this and make the national currency the primary currency so when they went digital now they wanted to use this to enhance the standing of the national currency and not get end up in a parallel world again um in kambodia you have a mobile phone penetration of around 150 percent that's a meaning two people have three phones um but only 30 percent of the people had bank accounts and so now similar maybe to the india approach in certain extent and what happened in china as well is that when you uh going to the mobile app and you you register yourself you automatically get registered with a bank account so uh i think a very clever way of banking the unbanked and the fascinating project if you want to google that quickly um a few things i maybe i should break here martin there's some trends uh we can give you an further talk about but given the the time i've got three more slides i think we can open it to question if you have any it's not there any questions i have quite a lot questions for you but at the moment i would say just talk on if you want to um otherwise i can well where's my view i have to my camera uh give me one second where am i now i'm visible sorry for that um yeah i actually i have some questions but i'm quite sure that will be coming some from the from the audience as well um at the beginning let's let's start with the beginning um the this this very first shot really uh was free and and zero i think it was so no cost anymore um and you said there you asked there there of course interesting question so how to make money if everything is free and you gave three answers if i got it right you said well one idea would be to do cross selling to other products which will be free the other one was a little bit like let's say upselling this metal credit card so giving something extra and the third one was subscription um subscriptions or recipients are paying the fees so there are some fees at the end i was thinking about not only payments but for example um the the money and the the the orders for stocks and you had the the the examples there from my experience in the past the banks tried to to get a fee for consulting for advice for the from the clients but they never really got a business model out of that so the clients well they were still paying for for the transaction but didn't like to pay for advice or for consulting how do you see that as a fourth pillar so didn't you mention it because you don't think this will ever work or is there a market in in advice or in consulting and additional things there well i mean i think the the reality is that there are two groups who have private bankers these days and it's at the top 0.1% and probably something like the bottom 30% or so right where um you actually you don't have a banking relationship and you need to go to the money broker in your village and you need to borrow at extreme rates etc and so i i think what many of the entrepreneurs the the social entrepreneurs the UN and and other organizations objective is and i heard it in saggy's comments at the beginning as well is these bank the unbanked and i actually think right we don't want to bank them because for the most part banks are maybe not necessarily the best solution that's at least fintech them or maybe right empower them to make their own decisions because simply as as successful supi is in india it's still 500 600 million registered there it still leaves a large part of the population uncovered yet although they have a magnificent infrastructure that also allows you to take like some for example pandemic benefits and get them directly into your auto recount and then go to a point of sale in your village and actually get the money so you don't need a bank you don't even right need to need any other infrastructure and that's that's ultimately also where i'm saying that we will have an atm less future because the atm is just the reverse of the payment process right so if i can go with my app and the qr code into a shop to pay why couldn't the shop function as in c2 atm and give me money which like in the u.s for example if you pay with a credit card and you you want some cash they add 20 dollars to your bill and you get 20 dollars in cash it's not no no different you don't need an atm anymore i think that's one of the interesting points if you're looking how digital transformation is changing our world that you really might go into a world without cash which for me being 50 nearly 50 now is a little bit of astonishing world actually i don't use cash much anymore so i for the last 10 months i think i spent about 200 euro in cash and all the rest i spent was was online or was spent with credit cards so i saw some figures for several markets over the last 10 12 months how how the cash was demissioning and we are getting into this cashless world from a government's point of view and you brought that as well into the discussion i think there's one one section is that the governments might be very interested to get a cashless world because the black markets are going away if you have a cashless world because everything you're doing will be in some way documented and will be much harder to evade taxes so i think that was one of the reasons why sweden did this as well so what do you see that there is a there are downsides to this cashless world besides maybe of not being able to get evading your taxes is are there other downsides is it the downside that you can't evade taxes i mean it's clearly the view sorry for that taking from the japanese perspective right the drive to cashless certainly uh first was driven a bit by trying to look a bit more advanced when the olympics come around whenever that might be now but certainly also looking at the the revenue generation for the government right all these small shops i we don't have to even take a bet i mean then they're not declaring all their income simply because they couldn't survive otherwise i think china right is is a very interesting example obviously very advanced in terms of their digital currency which is not necessarily blockchain based but um i think my i've got to have we need to be careful it might come across a cynical but um any any country that hits their gdp targets almost to the point every year smells a bit fishy to me and it's like you're you're kind of working backwards for the number and then you you kind of make it and i i honestly believe that the chinese government doesn't really have a good grips on the economic economic activity that's really going on because it's a big country and the incentives for making your numbers it's a bit like the old ge general electric and uh jack welch right the pressure is so high to make your numbers everybody's making the numbers even if they have to make up the numbers that when you actually have a cashless society and you've got the centralized currency you've got a real-time view into the economic activity and i think that's a big driver for china and the the the last one there is obviously um a global politics play of weakening the position of the the u.s. dollar but then we get into right a whole whole different topic that we can spend the next three hours on um i think historically it's very clear that you've never had a world currency global globally dominant currency from a country that right wasn't open and the payment flows and and many other things in china are not open so it would be surprising to see that happen but right uh if we knew the future we probably wouldn't be here one yeah that's one of the things you would like to see in the future um there's a first question from samuel he said when do you see banks accepting bitcoins or as a legitimate form of payment i think there are already some banks doing this somewhere all over the world i saw it at least in germany that you could buy bitcoins directly at your bank i don't know whether it works the other way around i think and and and 26 was one of them if i got it right but do you see other examples all over the world yeah i think it's a bit of a of of smoke and mirrors game quite honestly so uh japan was the first country to come out with a regulation around cryptocurrencies in april 2017 simply because we have some history here with mount gox and um actually the regulator also tried to change and be more uh business promoting and so i could go to an electronic shop in 2017 and pay with bitcoin and but just like the same as right paying with your u.s dollar credit card in japan somebody in the middle does see the instant transaction and and translation and the demersion get japanese yeah so new be careful what it actually is when people saying that uh i think the the payments play on bitcoin is over it's not going to be a payment instrument right so if again if you if you look at money you've got three functions you've got a form of payment you've got a store of value and got a unit of account and so i'm not being very adventurous if i say it's not going to be the goal global currency it's right it it's going to be something else i'm probably going to be some shape and form of maybe a central bank digital currency this is a store of value and i think you can view it as digital gold and many people see it that way and we can have a discussion whether store of value what volatility you'd be willing to accept but that's one thing will it ever become a unit of account i doubt it as well right and there's so much innovation going on in this overall space we're we're still in the very early stages who knows what's going to come in three or four years there are two questions coming now on both in the same direction so how do you see the the role of of the postal companies so if there is a at the moment a lot of company postal companies operate as worldwide accepting cash and and sending them around as a transfer service um if we get go into a cashless world it seems that that card of business will be at least smaller maybe in the future so how do you see the role of the post office especially probably in the in the less developed countries where they they have some kind of of local um acceptance and a very good trust status for as well so what do you think about that if i find it super interesting question because i the different um vectors on that i think so i think depends on how whatever tech savvy one is or uh adventurers versus using the the standard rails i think there's a there's a large part of the expatriate community right the domestic helpers that you have in singapore and hong kong and you've got a more limited amount here in japan um you've got quite a few in the middle east who are sending money back to bangladesh pakistan india etc right um i think the more tech savvy part of these have used digital currencies cryptocurrencies to transfer money because the fees are ridiculously low compared to a western union or money gram um and uh i personally right um there's there's nothing and now you've got right you've got the financial action task force f atf breathing down on the crypto exchanges so um actually there's no money laundering going on right if you want to hide hide your trail of illicit gains you don't use a cryptocurrency because you gather digital exhaust and people have gotten very very good at tracing that and so you you wouldn't right buy a gun with bitcoin that would be plain stupid but some people maybe still do that um the that was one other point but also i i would say that right i'm i've been a great fan from like 25 years ago almost of the the post office so i used two things when i first left germany uh generally for inter european transfers i used a fidelity because they had currency funds and so you could buy let's say a deutschmark fund with british pounds um with the british pound check and then sell them and have it transferred to your german account and if you were not time sensitive they had the best rates um because they were just charging you um basically buying and selling a very low margin and from japan i i did use postal transfers because they were the cheapest at the time and the the regulations were such that it wasn't like you had to fill in all your life's history and to prove the origin of the funds in the early 2000s so i loved the system it's like 20 bucks to send whatever two thousand dollars i would say so one percent not bad um uh in a cashless world look i mean there are many different ways of sending money i had to transfer a bulk recently from the u.s to japan i used transfer vice um quite honestly was the least painful it it was the the fastest clearly right when you send small amounts they're not transferring your money but if you send let's say hundred dollars from your transfer vice account in one country to another country assuming that they have a real-time payment system you basically hit the button and it will withdraw the money from your account on the one side and i don't know less than a minute later you see it on the other side right with larger amounts they don't do that then they really use still swift but there's also one if you talk about swift they have these gpi initiative and they get getting into the retail side so it's a crowded field right everybody's doing payments thanks for that so if i got it right you would say that especially in the in the transfer of money um from people working abroad for example is a big market where you said okay with the trust of a postal company you can really be in that market having the local trust i think there's another question from steven regarding the what would you be advised for the post in africa i would expand this to the well some of the less developed countries with regards to the role in achieving the the cashless policies so again it would be probably being not only in the cash part of this of the game as well but in the cash less part game of the well game part of the game as well for personal companies or how do you see that well i mean i i think um coming coming back to the the subtitle of the presentation i i think um again and this is something that we've been talking about for two plus years and uh it's now a theme that got accelerated unfortunately by the pandemic uh when we say we have a branchless and atm-less future right you i think in europe you've seen a clear decline in in bank branches over the last 10 years it's very miserable um japan is completely overbanked uh singapore is horribly overbanked but i mean it's a it's a tiny little place so there there really is a bank or an atm at every every corner um and in in a way right depending on the structure of the um postal office and whether there's a post bank or um separated like in in some countries or it's still under one one roof and others by law in most countries you must provide the postal service in rural areas right at the same price you do it anywhere else so which is obviously a lost leader where for me i feel in an environment where everybody is withdrawing from a physical presence and you have no choice but you need to continue providing that physical presence that's actually a clear differentiator and you need to see how you play that out right i think um the the the combination of online offline uh can provide a true proposition and i think what that means in your specific context in your specific country might largely depend on the customer and habits and so becomes an innovation question right it becomes becomes a question of try out and see what sticks and iterate around them but i but i even if it's depending probably on country as you're saying but i like the basic idea of saying the the the rural not only the rural areas but the the possibility to be everywhere and uh might not be only a hardship which is probably is sometimes but it might be as a valid chance which you can use especially for other services than only being the postal services and you can use the trust people have in you because if they give you a letter they know that this letter will be transferred to somewhere else they trust in you and you can well use that trust and spill it over to other things like banking and use it there so that makes sense i didn't want to make the the first part too depressing right but i think uh the decline in letter volume you will see and it's hard to put a time frame on that let's say over the next 15 years you will see a decline in parcel volume which kind of kept the postal office afloat while the letter volume declined as simply we will because we will be much more sustainable and we will be 3d printing locally right so i'm not going to might still go to amazon and and order blueprint for 3d printing for a certain part but that wouldn't be shipped anymore and so i'm thinking that my copy shop my print shop will become a 3d printing store where you take that blueprint and upload it but you could do the same with the post office right yeah which is interesting again norah thanks a lot i i know there are a lot of other questions i would have probably questions like you said you have slides for another three hours i would probably have a question for another three hours well yeah but we are already a little bit of overtime so um thanks a lot to you first of all for being here in the middle of the night being quite awake and gave us a great presentations so thank you norah for that presentation and answering all the questions thanks to you i will do a clapping now about you here now at least now you're still here a hundred people clapping like that thanks for taking the time appreciate it i know you could have done something else and work on new products for your clients and so taking one hour or a few days appreciate that thank you and i would like invite everybody so if you thought that the podcast podcast of norbert might be interesting for you and i know some of them so i know they might be interesting for you i would really recommend that and we might send around a link to them as well so thanks norbert and as well thank you alexander and serge and ebi from the upu for making all of this possible and the last thanks is going to everybody here attending uh norbert already said it thanks for taking the time attending the session and i hope to see you again we will do another session in some weeks and um we will just deciding on the the topics i just see norbert love grades and thanks and thanks for the presentation beside of me saying thanks for everybody it's thanks for everybody so have a good day have a good working day for the ones who are in the morning having a good evening having a good night for the ones who are late and i hope to see you all back soon thanks a lot and goodbye good night