 So I'm delighted to have with me in the studio today Mikhail Mamuta. He's an expert in microfinance with the Central Bank of the Russian Federation. He's also a chair of the Digital Financial Services Expert Group for the Alliance for Financial Inclusion. Thank you very much for joining me. Yeah, thank you for inviting me. Could you tell me a little bit about the activities of this working group that you chair within AFI? Yeah, you know it was one of the first working groups launched by AFI and initially it was called as Mobile Financial Services. But then we called to rename it to Digital Financial Services because digital is more wide and digital is more prospective rather than just mobile. So Digital Financial Services is a range of different services that can be provided through digital channels to unbanked people. Unbanked people is our ultimate goal so we would like to serve them. We're very transparent, we're pretty cheap and let's say comfortable services for them. So in the working group we do a lot of different activities starting from development of basic methodology and basic terminology of Digital Financial Services. We do a lot of P-learning so we compare different experiences and try to find the best and let's say we try to help our members to build the most effective strategy and policy in Digital Financial Services. And we work a lot on so-called focus nodes and those focus nodes or guidelines are devoted to different aspects of Digital Financial Services starting from terminology and to supervision and oversight. And I believe this is very important part of our work because DFS is very new and frankly speaking we don't have any standard that we can do common. But we have to work out something that will be foundation for such standards in the future. And Digital Financial Services working group of AFI I would say is very popular is not maybe good say popular but it's very a lot of demand for this. Because now it let's say more than 50 members and 43 countries join it. So it's the biggest working group within the AFI and the number of people and number of countries who would like to join it is growing. It means that Digital Financial Services is really something that people need all over the world. I think in fact you mentioned this is for unbanked citizens and I think that people would be surprised to know that Russia had an unbanked community. I think in Africa we accept this is pretty much the norm for many countries but quite an advanced and developed nation like Russia. Who is this community of people who are not banked in? Do you think this is actually more widespread than we think in most countries? Well, first of all I think that we have unbanked people all over the world in all the countries both in developing and developed. They are different but they are and in Russia for example it was stated sometimes at the very high level by top level officials including our president that level of financial inclusion is not sufficient. So first of all Russia is a huge country. We have a lot of people who live in remote area, who live in small settlements, towns, villages with no access to banking offices just because there is no bank offices. They can get some services through Russian Post, through microfinance organizations but still they need more. They need transparent transactions and here Digital Financial Services is something that can help because almost everyone have mobile phone. Not really smartphone but mobile phone is enough to do basic transactions and this situation is more or less the same for many other countries all over the world. Other people do not have access to banking accounts because for example they are migrants, labor migrants or temporary workers and they do not have Russian citizens and it's real problem for them. So through development of Digital Financial Services we can help them to send their money and do such transactions effectively and transparently to their motherlands. We were talking to one of the earlier interviewees about the lack of regulation in this area and you've got an overlap too from the sort of telecom side to the banking side. Do you see that as an advantage in developing this or is it actually slowing things down? It's a very good point. We definitely have a lack of regulation because regulation usually follows market. It cannot be ahead of market because it's some kind of support for the markets. And given that we are talking about very new matter, Digital Financial Services, then in many cases regulators are thinking what is the best approach to regulate and to supervise this new kind of animal. And what is very special here, that is mobile money or electronic money or DFS in general is some kind of a combination of money matter and channel matter because we serve this service, we let's say manage it through mobile phones or other kind of mobile devices. So it's very clear that approach to regulation and supervision in this area is a joint task for financial regulatory authorities and telco authorities. And now frankly speaking between this event too, we are thinking how to join our efforts to be the most successful and effective. I was going to ask you about the international dimension because you're here for the ITU's focus group on Digital Financial Services. What do you hope to achieve through your membership of that group? First of all I'm very happy to be here and this is my first experience with International Communication Union and this is great that ICQ decided to pay attention to this topic. Well this is the first meeting so we do not expect to solve all the questions we have. Moreover we are going to ask these questions and we are going to ask each other financial authorities, telco authorities, private sector, we are going to ask each other how to approach this problem and I very much hope that we will be able to find a reasonable solution. Could you tell me how the Alliance for Financial Inclusion could contribute to ITU's work in the development of new principles and frameworks guidelines for regulators? Well in our work we pay a lot of attention to different aspects of Digital Financial Services. We work a lot on technological issues, on regulatory issues, on KYC and AML safety issues related to terrorism and hacking problems, integrity. And some of those issues are very closely related to activities which done by telco regulators and especially for example technological issues or transferring of data or fair access to U.C.D. and SMS messaging services or for example consumer protection. And again we have to recognize how to work on this together because for example Russian Central Bank or other financial authorities all over the world they pay attention and regulate financial risks but they do not regulate risks of technological issues. They do not regulate for example hacking risks in mobile world and here is a huge potential for cooperation. We need each other. Financial authorities need or need telco authorities to work on this together. I think any kind of financial platform must always be a risk for cyber attack and Russia is actually one of the world leaders in cyber security. You have some really cutting edge companies there in this area. Do you think that you can contribute particularly to building a kind of best practice cyber security framework and help other countries to make this system safe and secure? Thank you very much for this question. I really appreciate it. You know I think yes we can. And the Russian Central Bank very recently launched multi-year very comprehensive project on digitalization of financial markets. This project will include a lot of issues related to simplified identification development of digital financial technologies and more and more and more. And for this project we already set up close cooperation with our telco ministry. And it's very clear when we look to the roadmap for this project we see that in some matters the central bank leads because it's financial risks. In some matters the telco ministry leads because it's technological and informational risk. And in some matters we join our efforts. So we definitely can let's say share with the rest of the world with the other members of our community our experience including experience in security. That's very very important question for digital financial services. Mikhail Mamuta, thank you very much for joining me today. Thank you very much.