 Welcome to Geneva and WSIS Forum 2022 and with me is Swaad Afshamsi who is senior manager digital in the enablement development section of the UAE. Very pleased to meet you. Very pleased to be here within this great conference. And tell me about the exciting project that you've come to share with the rest of the delegates. Sure. I mean everyone here within the conference have one vision which is improving the quality of life of citizen across the globe. And we were looking at how technology can help meeting that objective. And in a specific the leadership about a new UAE we're thinking of the blockchain as a technology back in 2018 and how will that help improving the quality of life of citizen. We have looked at different use cases and we try to find what is the real problem and our opportunity that we have to utilize this technology to achieve such a great objective. And if we look at the quality of life and the citizen in general right the core principle that we have is the identity. Who are you and who are you is not just your name right or date of birth it's everything about the individual your education the property you own and everything which is related to you your relationship are you married or not married where you're working and all of this constitute of your identity. And while we're moving to a digital world we need to have the equal or maybe even better identification of yourself or of the individual. And we have worked with different technology to achieve that and transform or be able to transform a physical identity into a digital identity that you can prove yourself in a digital world you can prove your identity. What documents do you own who you are what properties you have and that is to enable you to control your identity and be able to share it to apply for services the exact same way you're doing in a physical world. So for example if you want to open a bank account then you need to prove yourself you need to prove if you have a credit score you need to prove your citizenship and all the other elements of that. So we worked with that and we have come up with this initiative the UAE Pass and the digital vault where which any citizen in UAE can register themselves in a very accurate and highly trusted way through either a biometric fingerprint or facial recognition you get registered we know that you are the same physical person as the digital person then we work with different government entities who issue your identity documents and other documents to be issued digitally where in which they can be trusted and they can be verified at any point in time and we've also worked with different service providers such as the banking sector and now we're working with the insurance sector to be able to have a seamless journey where there is no need to visit the place to identify yourself or to prove your documents or even to have a handwritten signature all of this can be done within seconds at any point in time digitally and that was the core focus of the initiative it came very handy at COVID-19 during the pandemic because literally we were locked out and we were not able to navigate across UAE but you still can avail all these critical services really from your home at any point in time and there must be so many stakeholders involved in this how have you managed their expectations yes and that's really important because you're developing it a for the citizen so it should be services which is easy convenient for the citizen but also you have all the others so we touched up one for example the service provider we had a co-design sessions with them to work with them because they understand the domain we understand the technology they understand the business how can we redesign the services with them more importantly they are regulated right banking sector for example so regulation also play our role how can they relate our trust that we can transform the physical verification into a virtual one we had them also been addressed to verify that we have all the elements from a privacy security the standards everything that they look at to ensure that this transaction is genuine and also not to forget the legal so if there's a dispute at any point in time how can we prove to the court that this is actually supported and can be proven so addressing them was really important looking at all the aspect not only technology technology the policymakers regulators the business and most importantly the citizen themselves so we had multiple workshops we were able to issue a new law the digital signature law to support the digital signature within the application there was a support from the prime minister office where there was a policy that has been issued to promote the ua pass and the cell wall and also from a regulator a central bank for example have issued circulars where they have adopted the financial sector to consider that the cell wall and the ua pass is equal to the physical verification so it was really important to meet the expectation from all the stakeholders within the ecosystem it's so interesting to hear about thank you so much Swabh, Alshamzee. Thank you, thank you so much.