 Good afternoon, everyone. It's a real pleasure to be here amongst all of you. Well, my topic is a very relevant one, especially in these times when everything is best done from a distance without having to touch or physically contact anyone or for that matter, anything. In fact, I would go a step further. I truly believe that COVID-19 pandemic has been an inflection point to bring about a radical change and not only how bankers think about their industry, or we focus on some specific industry, but the nation as a whole. It has affected the society at an individual level and is also bringing about changes which are going to stay permanently, thereby becoming the new normal. And one of those changes, I believe, will be India becoming a more or more cashless society. The seeds for the required desidation were sown much earlier and the groundwork that has been done in the past was instrumental in propelling India towards being more and more digitally reliant. The last decade has shown a decrease in the use of cash in India and this is likely to continue in the coming years, but I mean, I'll give you some data points later on. But if we turn our eyes to the future, I do believe that India will move to less and less cash and that will happen soon. It is not far away. If you look at what is happening globally, the cash and digital modes have coexisted for decades, despite a robust card payment system. Even the US and China, the world's two largest economies, have a cash to GDP ratio over 8% and India is way higher. But if you look at lessons from some of the Scandinavian countries like Sweden, Norway or Denmark or New Zealand, cash is fast vanishing. Sweden, for instance, has cash equivalent to less than 1% of its GDP in circulation. Remember, I just said China and you are at a date. Besides widespread and stable broadband connectivity, what has also worked in favor of some of these countries is high acceptance rates with even small store owners always insisting on digital payments. Sweden today has the most aggressive policy to become cashless. Many Swedish retailers do not accept cash and only 20% of all transactions in Sweden are used, are paid using cash. And now if you look at, I'll just point to some of the experiments that are being done across the world in trying to create a cashless society. So there are some interesting examples I wanna share with you and they are mind-boggling. For example, biohacking is becoming popular in Sweden. Thousands of Swedes have now microchips implanted into their bodies so that they don't need to carry key cards, IDs and even train tickets. The biochip allows them to enter their office, gym or home or unlock the computer or smartphone by simply waving the hand in front of it. A Polish British startup, Wellmore, has created the world's first microchip implant that can be inserted under the skin and used to make contactless payments at any card terminal. Moscow Metro is planning to launch facial biometric payment. Passengers using the Moscow Metro will be able to pay their fares at metro stations just using phased biometrics by end of this year. So as long as you submit a biometric information it is possible. In China, Alipay and WeChat are often facial condition payments and both Alipay and WeChat payment systems are offered by many retailers in the country. Currently between 16 to 20% of the new POS machines of WeChat which are called frog machines, users pay with phased biometrics. So in 2018, by the way, a Danish firm called Bychip released a new generation of microchip implant that is intended to be readable from a distance, not close distance and is connected to internet. And the list goes on and on. So biotech is being radically democratized much the same way computers were in the 1980s. Implants are only a part of it. In the near future, we may have one inserted microchip in our body which will act as all in one for identification, for passports, for health data storage and obviously also as a payment device. So after sharing all that with you let's look at where India is today. But the Digital India program which is a flagship program of Government of India with a vision to transform India into a digitally empowered nation has taken multiple steps in the last few years and I just want to rush through them because I'm sure all of you are aware. So for example, Jam Trinity became the foundation of India's digital governance structure. India has witnessed numerous schemes that facilitated the public distribution system for people across the country. But the supply chain was broken and there were leakages worth thousands of crores each year. Rampant inequality was another hindrance to the country's development. So with increased digitization in rural areas and I'm sure you're reading about how Bharat Net is, there is auction on where Bharat Net will be rolled out by contracts given out to various parties and a lot of people are bidding for it. The problem is how do you connect 1.4 billion people across the length and breadth of the country and that led to birth of Adhar. Then Adhar led to opening of Jandhan accounts. Today India has more than 40 crore Jandhan accounts and 1.4 lakh crore deposits in those accounts. Mobile phone became the third leg of this Jam Trinity. So now with Adhar, with Jandhan accounts and mobile, you can actually bring it all together and it has helped move distribution of benefits from cash to cashless straight to the account and has obviously now become a foundation for digital governance in India. Today credit cards and online payment services are becoming popular in the last one year from June 2020 till June 2021, UPI, which I'm again, sure all of you are aware, based digital transactions have increased by 110% in volume and 109% in value. During COVID, India was home to the highest number of real time online transactions in 2020 ahead of countries such as China and the US. This was possible because of the infrastructure that has been created over the last eight to 10 years. For example, even in access, we are constantly working on improving our mobile apps user experience, strengthening our UPI infrastructure, improving uptime, providing reliable services to our customers and we can see the results. Today our mobile app is really one of the best apps in the country. So every financial institution starts with looking at the government infrastructure that has been created, then building trust, providing best in class user experience to customers and we are hoping that as that happens, the hesitancy towards digital payments will come down drastically and more and more people will start using it and once you start using it, it becomes almost impossible for you something else because it's so convenient, it is so easy to do. But then the major question to ask is with India having perhaps the only government created infrastructure for cashless payments, for digital payments, why India is still far behind and what are some of the big challenges will still face which need to be overcome before we get to a cashless society. Paper based payments in India continue to occupy a considerable share of 61.4%. Paper currency nodes are still an essentially essential part of digital life. India's currency in circulation touched 14.6% of its gross domestic product in 2021 which is higher than 12% that was before monetization. So on one side, you can almost say, oh God, we are going in the wrong direction. The reason is around 80% of the working Indians continue to be employed by informal SMEs and this sector produces close to 50% of our GDP and most of these Indians are paid in cash and don't forget the digital divide still remains huge as more than 40 crore people still don't have any access to internet. Spatial divide is also huge with the internet density in rural areas where more than 60% of the people live is still low at 25% compared to internet density in urban areas which is 90%. So digital divide is also being across the leading and lagging regions with states like Bihar and UP having very low internet density. And so this digital divide is still very huge. India digital sector still account for 10% of GDP which is quite low in compared to some of the emerging economies while e-commerce revenue has grown exponentially it still remains 5% of trade in India and still even today more than 80% of all retail transactions are made in cash. So on one side while we have seen a massive growth in terms of its market share and overall scheme of things is still very, very low and the speed at which we are bridging this gap is also not good enough and we need to obviously do much more work. So for example, KYC is no your customer. Yes, compared to 10 years back we are much better off and today we have Adhaar based KYC, eSign but digital KYC mostly revolves around Adhaar and Adhaar has its own challenges and limitations. It will increase its reach if the customer has multiple digital KYC options riding on national and state level databases like Russian card, electrical data, centers data, et cetera. Regional languages is another problem less than 15% of the Indian population speaks English. So there is a huge need to make the content and communication of level in regional languages that will be understood by major section of the non-English speaking community. Look at what has happened on the vaccination side. The worry is that a lot of the people in rural India cannot access the COVID app and book themselves for getting vaccinated. So even an access, for example, when we're looking at this problem, we realize that we need to localize ourselves and we are already working, for example, to make our app and website available in all kinds of regional languages. Then we also need to look at innovation beyond internet and smartphones. Around 50% of the mobile phone users in India are still using feature phones. And that's a very, very large number. So you can say, yes, internet is reaching rural parts of India and we are going for Bharat Net, but if 50% of the phones are still only feature based, then we have a problem. So we need to obviously ensure that we can create, Reliance is talking about it, for example, to create phones which are smart phones but available at a cheap price. Something needs to be done about that. Another thing which comes in the way of cash to society is education. Literacy rate of India is still at 74%. It means close to 25% of the population is not skilled to participate in any sort of dataization agenda, including digital payments. So we need to find a mechanism to upskill them, to make them part of digital India. Then we need to do hand-holding and training. Many of those who have access to internet and digital payments are either skeptical about using it or don't know how to use it. So the need of the hour is to train and hand-hold these people to use the platforms which are available, how to use the app, how do you use the platform, where you can use it, et cetera, et cetera. So for example, in access, we do multiple customer campaigns on explaining how the apps can be used, website or UPI and also how frauds are being done. So one of the other problems in, obviously for embracing the digital way of doing things is let's call it in the under the broad umbrella of cybersecurity. The year 2020 saw one of the largest numbers of data breaches in the world and in India. The total number of brute force attacks against remote desktop protocols jumped from about 1 million during early 2020 to around 3 million mid 2020. By early 2021, the average jumped to about 9 million attacks. So within a span of a year, we have gone from one to 9 million attacks. Hence to truly go cashless, a strong data security architecture is the key enabler and shouldn't compass all the internet, mobile and e-payment technologies. I'm sure you have come across a number of your senior members in your families who are afraid to embrace digital because they might have faced situations where someone tried to fool them on the digital infrastructure side, tried to fool them in terms of revealing their passwords, et cetera, et cetera. The mobile phones have been taken over by people who hacked into them and then they've transferred money out. And the incidents of this, the frauds happening because of lack of understanding, training is also increasing many fold and police is not able to go after a lot of these people. I mean, you've seen the web series also around this and one of the oddity platforms. But yes, the government is very focused on it. Government wants to create a cashless society. IRBI has set the ball rolling for a new umbrella entity for retail payments. So apart from NPCI, they want to create or give licenses to more entities so that more innovation can come to the marketplace. A number of applications have been received by IRBI and when hopefully a new license or licenses are given, hopefully more innovation can be brought to the market and the only way these new companies can make money is to take it to the parts of India which is not using digital payments today. So in my view, I truly believe that we are moving in the right direction and inching closer to our dream of a digital India, even as we speak, but there is a lot of ground to be covered for India to become a cashless society. I gave you some insights on where some of the work is required. Had only 10 minutes to speak. So thank you once again for the positive speaker and giving me a patient hearing. Thank you. Very happy to take on some questions if there are. Thank you, Mr. Chaudhary. Yes, you rightly pointed out that it's a journey started long back with Adhaar and the other administrators and during the pandemic, had there been no systems of cashless payments, we don't even, I mean, we started to understand how good things would have happened. So even a couple of questions that we have got and we have got a couple of minutes only, So there's this question, Mr. Chaudhary, which says that, do you think that cyber crime regulations and the zeal to move to cashless economy for India is not instinct? Yes, I think, you know, end of the day, the people who you talked about cyber crime, the thieves sometimes tend to be ahead of the regulations. So, and sometimes the regulations need to wait for things to evolve because before you can come out with the right kind of regulations also, you might be a bit blindsided if you impose all kinds of rules up front, the cashless part might never take off, the platform might never take off because there are too many rules. So you need to strike the balance, you need to allow for innovation. At the same time, you need to be very, very watchful for misuse of that platform. We are seeing misuse, we are seeing hackers and people who are, you know, taking a lot of people, I mean educated people for a right because we are quite vulnerable. And they know exactly what part, what, where is the vulnerability? And they use that to gain access to our accounts or to our passwords or to a mobile phone and cyber crime obviously is rising and rising rapidly. But I think the government is fully seized of the matter and it's not just all the constituents are coming together, the banks are coming together, the center is coming together. There are police forces who are engaging with the banks to see how we can work together to ensure that some of these culprits are caught, we are making our platforms also tighter. We are coming up with algorithms which catch sudden payments much faster. We stop those payments. So if someone suddenly starts transferring money out, we allow, maybe one might go through, but at the second one, the banks will invariably use their algorithms to start asking more questions, delay it, stop it. Now the banks are also well connected. So ultimately the money moves from one bank account to another bank account. You know, the whole system is now coming together to ensure that unless cash is taken out that the money ultimately is lying in some accounts, it can be pulled from that. So yes, the regulation is slightly behind but they're not working at contradiction. I think they will continue to converge, converge more and more. That does not mean that these will remain where they are. They will find new ways to take advantage of the system. But you know, it's an evolving mechanism and it's an evolving infrastructure, an evolving scenario. Hopefully the incident of frauds and some of those things will come down. Finally, it's a human nature to act vulnerable or become vulnerable very quickly. If people were not, I think some of these things will not happen. Right, right. Mr. Jyothi, we'll take one more question. So you spoke about that. It's very important to convey in there with the customers in their language. And I think there was always a RBI circular that you know, banks need to communicate with customers. But there's a question that more often than not it is seen that even uneducated people are given passbooks in languages they do not understand. And also one more question which I would like to add to it that you know, even if we do communicate in the language of their choice, the number literacy problem, do you think that remains, still remains a big problem? No, literacy is a problem as I pointed out very clearly and I am talking about 25% of the people are educated. The people we are calling educated also maybe in many ways a lot of them are uneducated or they're not number literate, as you said. They are not computer literate. They're not, you know, apps literate. So in that sense, the portion of population which cannot deal with these applications or these statements is still large. But see, it's a journey. Earlier they did not have an account. Now they have an account. Now a lot of them have learned how to read those account statements or at least they know what balances are and how they can transfer money simply from one account to the other. So more and more population needs to be roped in to open accounts, get comfortable with them, start using the infrastructure and gradually as UPI has become ubiquitous, you know and you see for yourself, the lot of people you never imagined could use apps are using those apps and getting comfortable with it and not getting fraught in the process, right? So I think things are improving, but it's a journey and India has a longer journey because of lack of internet, lack of education, literacy, people being a bit vulnerable and so on and so forth. So it will take time. You have to be patient, but we'll get there. Sir, one last question. So there's a question. They said that when wallets came, banks were very of wallets and now cryptocurrency is here and banks and the government as well seem to be very about it. What's your view? Well, the government is very of cryptocurrency for other reasons because they believe the cryptocurrency allows people to use that platform to remain anonymous and that is something which is not issued by the government of India. So you are bought by the government at large and as a result, there is alternate payment mechanism which is existing in the country which the government has no control over which makes them very uncomfortable. So RBI and some of the other central banks around the world, including China for example, are very clear that if there is a digital currency to be issued to be issued by the central bank rather than someone coming up and starting their own currency. But you look at the market cap of all the so-called bitcoins or cryptocurrency out there it is already very, very large. A lot of it might be because of speculation but it is an alternate mechanism which is available. A lot of people are using it for speculation or for all wrong kinds of things which they want to hide from the governments but it's an evolving situation. I do believe that India has taken a very clear stand that they will not allow cryptocurrency to very survive or to be issued in India. They are saying, obviously Supreme Court has come out with a judgment saying that it is the right of people to deal in cryptocurrency but I'm sure at some stage a legislation might come out once a digital currency is launched which will restrict the ability to use other cryptocurrencies and make people converge onto the digital currency which RBI might issue. And there are very legitimate reasons for doing it. Mr. Chaudhary, there are many more questions and hope we had time to take all of them but we have run out of time. Thank you so much for joining us today here. It's a real pleasure to have you and your views on the FinTech and the cash place economy is going to help a lot of people who are attending here.