 Welcome to the Fiji Symposium 2019 here in Cairo in Egypt. We're very pleased to be joining the studio today by David Lubinsky, who is Senior Program Officer for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. David, welcome to the studio. Pleasure to be with you. Now, I'd like to start off by asking you, David, what will it take for the world's poorest to prefer digital financial services over cash? This financial inclusion symposium here is hopefully going to be discussing this, but I wanted to ask you, will digital financial services be enough for this to happen? Yeah, there's really two big aspects to the question that you're asking that are very important. First and foremost, the use of digital tools has to be as easy and convenient as cash is today. So these tools really need to be developed in a way that the poor can easily adopt them and use them. And there's an incredible amount of innovation in the financial sector, as everyone knows. And what we would like to see is that that innovation reaches the poor. A digital account is the first step. And so is it enough? It's not enough, but it is the first step. The hackathon that's taking place here, as a matter of fact, is a perfect illustration of the amount of creative energy in the sector. And having the hackathon associated with the Fiji Initiative is just a perfect blend of what are the right-enabling policies and standards and rules joined up with the best that FinTech has to offer. Can we talk a little bit about the Fiji Initiative? What brings Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation together with World Bank and ITU? Yeah, so there's really two components to that as well. So you have three great partners coming together. ITU, obviously, bringing the organizational structure as well as the ability to focus on the right standards and normative processes and business practices and then how to propagate those. The World Bank, which is deep in the sector and has been our partner in financial inclusion for years now, and the Bank for International Settlements, who also brings that standards approach to the banking sector and increasingly expanding that out into the payments world, which those three partners together really provide the right backbone to really supply the input on policies and regulations and that sort of thing. So the second part though, which is really important, is the engagement of the community. And by that I mean the regulators, the people that are providers of services in the markets that we're discussing. And you bring these together so that the people setting and charting the direction are getting the input from people from the field and from the ground. And Fiji really brings both together very well. You mentioned regulation. What innovations do you think are required in regulatory collaboration to create an enabling environment for digital financial services? So the thing about the marketplace for financial services is the digital technologies just unlock so much potential for people to incorporate these digital payment tools into their daily lives. We believe that the poor will benefit greatly from this. The thing is that financial services for very poor people look a little different than they do for higher income wealthier people. People that are poor make lots of transactions, and these are low value transactions. And so the question is, when you have lots of low value transactions, what are the right system capabilities? What are the right tools for oversight and management that are appropriate for that? And what we find is that regulatory approaches that were, you know, for traditional large value, you know, credit type markets may not be applicable. And so one of the biggest challenges then what are the right tools? What are the right enabling policies for an environment that is, you know, primarily low value transactions but lots of them? It's interesting you say poor. I was just wondering what your definition is of poor because I mean you hear a lot of people say marginalized or I mean there are all sorts of different adjectives that are used, but what are we really looking at in terms of poor? Well, when we think about the poor, we are talking about the poorest people on the planet. And there are still 1.7 billion people that have no financial services of a formal kind whatsoever. These are also the same people that are most vulnerable to crises and to other types of, whether it's environmental or other types of disruptions. These are the same people that are also targets of some support and assistance and development aid. And one of the things that we find is that development aid is increasingly looking at digital tools to deliver aid. So now we have the very poorest people that are the most vulnerable, most deserving of support and aid, that in fact could use a digital tool to receive it. And so the relevance of having an account for them is the difference between getting or not getting assistance, which is really, really vital. And two thirds of these have a mobile phone. So perhaps the link really can be encouraged and enhanced and nurtured. What's exciting about that is the kinds of services that are appropriate for people that are very poor and getting their first account are described quite well in the World Bank, Bank for International Settlements report, the payment aspects of financial inclusion, which they talk about a transaction account, which is this is an account where I can receive a payment. And so for those poorest people that are targets of payments and other social supports, that account is sufficient for them. Now we also have to remember that a lot of those phone owners are holding a feature phone, not a smartphone. And so smartphones offer so much more capability and the innovation that's happening, definitely very exciting. But we also have to remember that a lot of those first-time account holders are going to have a feature phone. So we need developers to keep in mind that there's really at least two different categories of end devices that need to be included. Absolutely. And finally, I wanted to ask you, what are the main expectations for this? This is the second symposium. The first one was in Bangalore actually in 2017. This one here is in Cairo, in Egypt, both very interesting environments. What are the expectations? What would you hope people will take away from this symposium? Yeah, so this is a very important stage of the project. So this is near the midpoint. So by this time, the kinds of topics that are on the agenda and the kind of presentations that are being made are really presenting the interim results. They're showing the progress that's been made on these important enabling topics, whether they're regulatory or technical. And so what we hope is that people get the promise and see the potential and are going to push hard until the finish of the project. But also that they start incorporating some of these ideas and as they go back to their home markets, they start to anticipate with this kind of input coming from Fiji, how can I take action in my country? How can I either deliver a service or as a regulator? How can I help enable these services in terms of getting into my market and the poor people that are my citizens? Well, we hope to catch up with you again in the very near future. But in the meantime, thank you very much for joining us in this studio. David Levitsky. Pleasure to be with you. Thank you.