 I'm here at the ITU in Geneva, and I'm very pleased to be joined by Bilal Jamoussi, Chief of the Study Groups in the ITU standardization sector. Bilal, thank you very much for joining us today and welcome. Thank you very much for having me. So we're here at the final meeting of the Digital Financial Services Focus Group. Can you please explain to our viewers how this Focus Group came to be and what are some of the major achievements and outcomes of the group? Yeah, sure. I mean, about almost three years ago now, February 2014, Sasha Polverini and Jason Lam from the Gates Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation came to visit the ITU and wanted to explore opportunities for work on digital financial services because the platform for the digital financial services is an ICT and telecom operators network mostly and wanted to see how we can partner on this work. So we invited them to join the ITU as a sector member and to make a contribution to propose a study of the work on the Focus Group on Digital Financial Services and that's exactly what they did and they became a member of the ITU. They presented a contribution to the TSAC, the Telecom Standards Advisory Group, which immediately agreed to set up a new Focus Group in June 2014 on digital financial services with very clear terms of reference to really bring the two sectors, the financial sector and the telecom sector into an open multi-stakeholder environment where the dialogue can happen on all aspects of digital financial services from the regulatory side, from the technology side, from the standard side. And so after two years now, two and a half years of the inception and two years of actual work of the study group, we're very pleased to see the energy that went into the group and the output that they had. It's quite active, this Focus Group. It had seven meetings, three in the ITU headquarters in Geneva, two in the World Bank headquarters in Washington DC and two other meetings, one in Asia and one in Africa, where most of the target countries, where we're trying to provide this financial inclusion, are. And so it was really quite a diverse group with now we have a mailing list of more than almost 400, 500 people, 250 of which are not members of the ITU, which shows the openness and the opportunity, the unique opportunity and bringing experts who are not traditionally working in the telecom sector to dialogue with the telecom sector, both from a vendor perspective and operator perspective and telecom regulator perspective. And the output, the result of this two-year effort is quite rich. 27 technical reports in diverse areas from consumer protection to the ecosystem, to the interoperability, to the need for authentication, key performance indicators of quality of service, really laying the ground from both a technology and regulatory framework with all the players around the table, which makes this Focus Group quite unique. There is no other international platform that is open in this sense and that was able to bring all the stakeholders and all the partners to the table. And, you know, with digital financial services, one of the main goals is inclusion. Can you please explain the role ITU has played with bridging the financial gap inclusion, if you will? Yeah, the financial inclusion, I mean, this effort in the Focus Group and the discussion on financial services before the Focus Group was not really happening in the ITU. And as a result of this Focus Group activity, this year in November, our World Telecom Standards Assembly agreed on a new resolution to promote the use of ICTs for digital financial inclusion. This is a first resolution of this kind. It was approved by the 193 member states, which gives prominence and visibility to the role that both telecom sector and financial sector players have to play in order to promote the use of financial inclusion and the use of ICTs for financial inclusion. Because of this Focus Group, we also signed an MOU with the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, which is an organization that brings all the central bankers together. And so now we have this collaboration agreement with AFI and it's a constant dialogue as a real partner and a stakeholder in this Focus Group. So this activity raised the bar in terms of awareness, the engagement of the experts in the ITU. It brought new experts to the ITU that are not traditionally playing in the telecom sector. And these 27 reports are now migrating and being transferred to the study groups. And the ITU study groups are the ones that issue the international recommendations with the capital R that are essentially the international standards or international guidelines. And we see quite a rich and diverse output from the Focus Group with respect to economic policy and regulatory issues, with respect to the quality of service of the network and the quality of experience of the user, with respect to the security of the transactions and so on and so forth. So it really created a number of seed of new work that is now taking advantage of the work that was done in the Focus Group and starting to become a work item in the various study groups of the ITU team. So there's a lot of important work that's taking place in this Focus Group, but it's coming to an end. What are some of the next steps for the Focus Group in the next three to four years, let's say? Well, the main element here is that because we managed through this Focus Group to create a new and unique group of stakeholders, not to lose the momentum and to maintain this group of experts together. And so we have been in discussions with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, AFI, and other partners to see how we can put in place a project or program or an activity to maintain this momentum and take all the learning and the recommendations from this Focus Group and implement them in target countries, which will really bring the ultimate benefit to having more transactions in the digital space, less cash, more digital financial transactions, which will be more reachable to the poor. Out of the 2 billion that don't have a bank today, 1.7 billion have a mobile phone. And so that's why the ITU is a key partner in this dialogue. And now with the recommendations of the Focus Group, we can go out in the various countries and implement these recommendations and really increase the financial inclusion. Okay, Bilal, I'd like to thank you very much indeed for your time and wish you a successful final meeting and workshop during the next few days. Thank you very much.