 Good afternoon and welcome. We're coming to you from day two of the Fiji Symposium in Bangalore, the platform for all dialogue on financial inclusion. And with me today is the Executive Director of Financial Inclusion and Customer Protection and Communication from Reserve Bank of India, Ms. Urekham Orandi. Welcome, ma'am. Thank you so much for being part of this. This is the first Fiji Symposium and it's happening in our country, India. What are your thoughts on this? I think it is a recognition of the decade long efforts at financial inclusion and in fact we are gathering stream and we have still a long way to go but we are in a good spot at the moment. So it's good that we are having the Fiji conference here so that we might also learn from others' experiences. Correct. That's great. Thank you. What according to you is the potential of digital financial services to actually increase financial inclusion? Actually financial inclusion started with digital financial inclusion when your ICT solutions became available in the year 2007-8. At that point of time we were concentrating on bank-led financial inclusion with business correspondent models and a basic banking account. So the regulatory effort was at enabling the BC model and the basic banking accounts. For the purpose of basic banking accounts we felt that in the beginning for example if you have to do financial inclusion in the hinterland the accounts may not be used. So regulations were put in place to ensure that there were no charges if there was zero balance and the accounts will not become dormant if the accounts are not used. So these two regulatory guidelines were issued to ensure that these accounts are usable indefinitely and for an unlimited period without being closed on account of dormancy or inactivity. So once the BC model was put in place the main hitch came in identity because of these AML and KYC guidelines and the people for example 55% of the population is in the farmers, they are agriculturalists and around 30% are migrants in the cities. None of them had documents for their identity nor did they have any address proof. You know you don't have address proof in the village, you don't have identity in a village or for migrants. So that is why Aadhar was you know pushed. It was implemented, it was pushed under Dr. Vaivir at the he had taken special you know initiative to push the Aadhar initiative. So once the Aadhar came into being came into place the basic bank accounts got linked to Aadhar and that is how it was easy to open you know a bank accounts because of this Aadhar linkage and in fact the government also came under prime minister Modi they also became very active and that pushed it further and that jam and along with that the mobile became very you know cheap. We had cheap handsets, we had the data also became cheap, I mean the data charges became cheap so this jam Trinity has resulted in this financial inclusion being you know brought out in a greater scale and a greater you know and apart from this I think the last mile connectivity was a very big issue and the last mile connectivity had to be you know sustainable. It had to be cost effective not only for the you know I mean customer but also the person who was providing the last mile connectivity. So brick and mortar branches were totally you know they were a no-go as far as sustainability of last mile connectivity was concerned. That is why we brought in other players like your small finance banks who had more inroads into the hinterland as well as your mobile the payment banks who are now NBFC which are non-banks. So non-banks have also now brought into the platform so that the financial inclusion gets greater velocity. Correct that's great but like you said there are people who are below the poverty line in India and across the world what do you think are the main factors for them to actually prefer digital financial services over traditional methods of cash and banking? You know we have a demographic advantage over the rest of the world. 68% of our population is below 35 so as far as digital and digital financial inclusion is concerned I think they will lead the front runners and all of them have mobile so all of them are into smartphones or you know feature phones so our 68 the 68th person will do the financial inclusion even though they are poor they will link up with I mean an ecosystem has to be evolved to include everything into the digital space including say for a farmer the input supply should be available digitally he can he should be able to sell it in an E-Mundi you know so the whole ecosystem has to also you know develop so that the digital financial inclusion can happen for the poorest of the poor. When it comes specifically to the role of the RBI what is that role and the next steps in digital financial services in India? As you know that we have always insisted on interoperability it started our RTGS NFT was interoperable our ATMs became interoperable so and also our mobile phones became interoperable IMPS is interoperable so everything is you know that is the key to the you know to the way forward and RBI has always seen that and in fact now mobile wallets also they want to make it interoperable so that is why you leverage into the infrastructure like if you have silos you can't leverage into the infrastructure that is there so with interoperability of all payments and all payment instruments across the spectrum as well as providing CKYC the centralized KYC though so that people don't have to give their other documents to each and every you know places you just have a KIN to to give your consent to any financial service you know that is the one just one and you just have to give your KIN if you want that service you just give that KIN for you know whatever service you require so that is the you know our wish list for the future I hope that wish list does come true thank you so much ma'am