 Good morning, everyone. This is the first Moodle mood that I'm attending. I've been a Moodleer over the last two years, and I'm more involved on the instructional design part with Finker Impact Finance when it comes to our learning management system, Moodle, that we internally call the Finker Learning Zone, our FLC, so to say. I'd like to thank the organizers, the HQ team of Moodle for this conference, the Moodle partners for contributing so much to this community and Moodle, and all of you who are here, I've had a lot of interesting conversations, and it was very insightful for me. So let me ask you, who of you in this room does own a check-in or a savings account? Hands up, of course, yeah? Everyone. Let me ask the other way around. Who of you is 15 years older and does not have a savings or a checking account with a bank? Is there a person in this room? No. Yeah, most likely not. It would be very surprising. But this is what you will encounter if you zoom out of the rich countries, countries like the U.S., European countries, and you zoom into poor countries, developing countries, low-income countries. So let me share a few facts with you. In the developing world, only 54% of adults do have a bank account. In 2017, 2 billion people worldwide did not have a bank account. This is including a checking account or a savings account. There's the global index that the World Bank runs with data from more than 100 countries, low-income countries, in particular, Southeast Asia and Africa. And this is what it says. The population age 15 years and older, 62% of this population does not have access to a bank account. They just don't own it. More than 27% don't have a formal savings account. And here's the worst. Only 11% of them do have access to formal borrowings, including small business loans, including educational loans, including housing improvement loans, et cetera. But here's the good news. Just in three years, between 2011 and 2014, more than 700 adults in the developing world became bank account holders. So something is happening here, things are improving, and this is a great achievement, by the way. A lot of this achievement can be attributed to mobile device technology. Mobile money is becoming a big thing in the developing world. Also, in the US, some of you might be using the Apple wallet, I think it's called, and there are other ways to pay without using plastic nowadays, just using a smartphone. This is also happening in the developing world. And part of the success that we have seen over the last few years is because of mobile technology and mobile money. But this technology needs to be provided and run by financial institutions. So, interstage, right? Microfinance. I do work in the microfinance industry. I've been working in this, yeah, feel for the last 14 years now. Doing, yeah, the core business, managing the core business, and over the last seven years, involved mainly in the learning and development function of microfinance. It is a global industry that, yeah, labels itself as not being part of mainstream banking. Instead, the mission of microfinance is to be the bankers to the unbanked in the world, to be the bank of hundreds of millions of people that simply don't get access to financial services because mainstream banks think they're simply not worthy of being the bank customers. So meet one of our customers. Finker serves more than 2 million customers worldwide currently. This is Maria in Nicaragua, a typical microfinance thinker. Customers should say in this case, female oftentimes, and very often the only provider in their families in their households. Asking for loans between 500 to 3,000 US dollars to be able to develop their small business. Let me just give you a quick walkthrough when it comes to microfinance. It's an industry that, or I would say a project, a socially driven project that has been existing since the mid-70s and it evolved over the last 40 years soon into a global industry. Especially over the last 15 years, we have seen a rapid growth globally, reaching more than 130 million clients in the developing countries. And yet, microfinance, this is according to good estimates and good data, is only reaching 20% of its potential market nowadays. So there's a lot to be done in the future. Let me share with you this slide here. It indicates the eight pillars of global peace. What is it that is needed in our world to secure peace in our countries globally? And you will find in particular two of these pillars here that are actually very much related to what we do in microfinance. One of them being creating a sound business environment, number one and number eight, making sure that everybody has equal access to resources, to develop a business, secure income for your family and your household and be able to provide education to your children. So because it has proved to be a powerful way to lift low-income entrepreneurs and poor communities out of the poverty, apart from other important conditions that are, of course, necessary to promote economic development. And microfinance is not the policy here for poverty alleviation in the world, but it is an important ingredient and essential contributor to poverty alleviation. This is one of the reasons it is important. And one thing leading to the other, in 2006, the Nobel Peace Prize. Many of you might know that, or maybe still recall it, was awarded to this man, Mohamed Yunus and Crimean Bank in Bangladesh. A microfinance institution that was started by Mohamed Yunus in 1976 to make sure that everybody has access to financial services in this country. Mohamed Yunus, after getting his PhD in economics in the U.S., decided to go back to his slow homeland country, Bangladesh, and try out the concept of microcredit, especially with our female customers. And it worked. This is basically where microfinance, so to say, was born and invented. And since then, it has spread all over the world. A few years later, in the early 80s, the founders of Finca understood, and at that time we started out as a foundation and we're still a foundation. That poor people could receive and pay back small loans and that these loans could transform their lives. Over 30 years, that concept of microfinance has helped millions of hardworking people to build businesses, increase their income, and improve their lives. Today, where Finca impact finance, our majority shareholder is still a foundation very much socially driven and mission driven. And we work in more than 20 countries on four continents. The closest country probably being to the U.S., actually to Miami, Haiti, where we run a microfinance bank. We have been doing this for the last 30 years in Haiti with quite a lot of success, especially in the last 10 years, despite a very challenging environment there. So, how is Moodle making a difference in our business? Until two and a half years ago, all of Finca's job training, and we do have almost 11,000 employees at this point in time, was being delivered through face-to-face instructor-led training. There was no e-learning, no blended learning, not to mention mobile learning. Just pure face-to-face training. And, yes, workplace training, it is a costly thing, so we had to come up with innovative approaches to change this, especially to be able to respond much faster to the dynamics of the core business going on. So, we decided to implement Moodle for three reasons. We looked at commercial vendors of learning management systems, and we included Moodle as one of the few learning management systems not being a commercial one. We shortlisted Moodle among three other commercial vendors, and we decided to go for Moodle. I would say in particular for two reasons. Of course, the convincingly affordable cause of Moodle was a big, big factor that played a big role. But apart from that, we just found that we wanted to support this global project, this global community called Moodle. We felt that Moodle and Finca, to a large extent, are very like-minded projects, organizations, communities, and it does for us more than we actually ever expected. Here's the reality of the Finca world. 50% of our almost 11,000 employees are field staff without computers. They're out in the field visiting customers where they run their businesses and they're talking to them, they're doing a due diligence to decide whether a customer is going to be able to receive the next business loan or other financial services that we provide. This is the nature of their work. So, the other reality of their work is when they're in an office, 20% of their time, they don't have access to a computer most of the time or not that easily. So, they simply do their job based on paper and pencil. This is the reality. This is the Finca customer relationship officer or representative in the field with customers doing her job and noting down all the data needed to take a decision later on in the credit committee. So, how do we turn this circumstance into a business case for mobile learning? Well, I can tell you paper and pencil for field staff in Finca is also increasingly becoming something of the past. The core business fortunately has decided to go digital. This is the future and to digitalize all the processes happening at the front line of our business. So, this is where we, the learning and development function thought we need to leverage on this. We need to take advantage of this and we need to be much better at delivering workplace training to our staff including mobile learning and planet learning. So, what you see here, tablets is becoming very rapidly the new reality of our front line employees. And this is something you do see happening not only with organizations like Finca but in the developing world. Yeah, most people don't own as we do. Three devices, the desktop, the tablet and the smartphone but simply just one device. If at all a tablet, they consider themselves very privileged. It is most of the time simply a smartphone but it is taking over. This phenomena that we call the leapfrogging, right, where areas, countries in Africa for example that have been excluding from technologies 10, 15, 20 years ago like being able to use at the workplace a laptop or a desktop. All of a sudden they find themselves using smartphones when they have not been using a desktop or a laptop over the last 15 years. This is the reality of many millennials in African countries. They haven't been raised with laptops or desktop computers but here we go all of a sudden. They find themselves using smartphones and they are at least as good as doing this as millennials in the US or anywhere else. So, here's another pillar in the global peace index that I want you to pay attention to because it actually relates to what we're doing, all of us in this room, one way or the other, yeah. It requires high levels of human capital to secure world peace, peace in any country of the world and maybe it's not explicitly included in one of these pillars here but it is if you would break it down, the second pillar, an important ingredient. Every year, We're Social produces a huge study of the behaviors and trends shaping the global digital landscape. So, what are insights that we get from that study and there are a few of these studies out there that you can look at. I tend to use this one mainly to educate myself and what you see is that a lot of the African countries when it comes to internet connectivity bandwidth are pretty much excluded nowadays. Africa, by the way, is an important continent for the business the Finca Impact Finance does. You also do see that if you look at the example of Africa more than 80% of the population is connected to a mobile device and here's the good news, 46% are connected to a smartphone. Look at the case of Nigeria where Finca Impact Finance runs a bank. 51% of the adult population does own a smartphone. So, we're taking advantage of these trends, of the leapfrogging happening in our countries where we operate in, of the fact that we deal mostly with millennials among our staff who do know very well how to use a smartphone for their purposes. The educational levels, the background that they have when it comes to educational levels might be lower than in rich countries, but I've found that they don't lack behind at all millennials in developed countries like Germany, Spain, where I do have my background but also the U.S. where I've been living the last eight years. So, what were the challenges of implementing the branded mobile app of Moodle? We decided we didn't want to be a wimp. Last year, we were only implementing Moodle as a system, consolidating, I believe, seven or eight instances of Moodle across our network into one global Moodle platform for 21 countries and more than 11,000 employees. A few months later, the mobile app was in the headlines and we decided to go for it immediately. With the support of eLearning Partners, they're in the room. Thank you, eLearning Partners, for doing such a great job in supporting us with this and we will continue working with them to start and launch a second mobile app, not for our employees, but this time for 2 million customers. So, just in brief, what were the challenges we have encountered? Yes. How do you get training managers, instructional designers, trainers in the countries that we work in to think differently, to think future, to think mobile learning, blended learning when all they have been doing for many, many years is simply face-to-face training. They do a wonderful job at that, but so this is a huge educational piece we need to do internally. The global learning and development function I think impact finance with more than 60 learning and development professionals in our network. This is happening little by little, but we see people shifting and focusing more and more on the opportunities that are out there thanks to technology, thanks to the fact that we do have Moodle, thanks to the fact that we have a mobile app. Limited availability of mobile learning content, certainly this is for the time being a challenge. What's the purpose of having a mobile app if there is no mobile content that is really relevant to employees? But we are catching up. So, we are going to invest quite a lot of money in 2018 to get as much micro-learning and mobile content out to our staff. This is going to help us to reduce face-to-face learning time. It is going to reduce certainly the cost of workplace training. It is, after all, a business we are running and we need to be very aware of what we are spending on each of our employees. So, this is going to be an advantage. Learner adaptability to embrace e-learning to start with, but also mobile learning. Certainly, this is a challenge. We are seeing in some countries more and others less to give you an example that in America, they just love everything that is mobile. They are ahead of everybody else. The African countries, the Southeast Asian countries are working in the Middle East when it comes to digitalizing their business processes and so on, including learning. And in other countries, we do see that people still need to get on board. But we are pushing out programs face-to-face, e-learning to all of our staff to simply build capacity when it comes to learnability related to e-learning, self-paced, self-guided learning and mobile learning. Of course, restricted internet. The good news here is restricted in the sense of it's there, you do have mobile network providers in the country, internet providers, but it is costly. However, since we are going completely tablet for all our front-liners staff, it will have to be online, right, to use these tablets and devices efficiently and effectively. So what else could we ask for as learning a development function than having all of a sudden within the next one and a half years? This is the goal for the network. All of our front-liners connected to internet anywhere and everywhere. We face some issues with regulators. We are banks where we work in. We're being, yeah, like every other bank anywhere in the world, highly regulated. So we ran at least in two countries into problems with the local regulator, but we have been able to, yeah, get these issues resolved simply by talking to the regulators. It is in these countries, believe it or not, for many of them, something new, yeah, and they can get pretty fast, very suspicious of what a bank is doing with mobile running and e-learning, and, yeah, most of the time, they're very concerned about data. In this case, since it is staff, data, mainly in content, we're not compromising client data. It has been pretty easy to convince them that we're doing a good thing here for our business and for our customers at the end of the day. We've seen Google play, for some reason, blacklisting some of our countries. The Democratic Republic of Congress, one of them, I think Malawi is another country in Africa and Georgia, a highly advanced country in the Caucasus. The former Soviet Union Republic is blacklisted, but there's a workaround that we found to make this happen. Yeah, so we need to support users, staff, to download the app on their smartphones and tablets. It needs a bit more support, but it's possible. What's our vision for the next two years? We want to get our mobile learning, obviously, from what it is right now, which is around 1% to at least 25% in the coming two years, 2018 and 2019. And I'm talking about available learning hours, seed time for a micro-learning piece of content or a learning course that could maybe take 15 to 20 minutes to navigate it from the beginning to the end. As I mentioned before, soon we will be launching, with the support of e-learning partners, a second model system to provide financial education, content to thinkers, to million-plus customers throughout the 20 countries we work in. And that would include the branded mobile app. Financial education has been a very important part of what Finca does when it comes to the social performance that we do measure at all levels and in all we do. So how does mobile contribute to peace? I told you that microfinance just 11 years ago was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Imagine the year 2032. It's early October. You're sipping your morning coffee, looking at your mobile device and screening, scanning the world news. And here's what you read in the New York Times. The Nobel Peace Prize goes to Moodle. Let me ask Martin, how does that make you feel or their HQ team of Moodle? Pretty good, yeah. I know how I felt in 2006. I was working in Central Asia at that time with one of the thinker subsidiaries that were running there in Tajikistan, the neighboring country of Afghanistan. And I read the news of Muhammad Yunus getting awarded the Peace Nobel Prize. And he, by the way, used to be on our foundation sport back in the 90s. So he said, this is not only for me. This is not only for Grameenbank in Bangladesh. This is for of the microfinance community globally, yeah. So some of you might think this is impossible. Well, think twice. When Muhammad Yunus embarked on his journey to achieve poverty in Bangladesh through microcredit, do you believe he was thinking of becoming a hero of world peace one day? Well, certainly not, but he had a vision. So I would say take a powerful mission and a great vision, steer both ingredients, and fast forward once more to the year 2032. This time not just a headline, but real actions. Here we go, Martin on his way to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. And you know this slide. Martin shared it with us yesterday. I thought what a coincidence, but it shows how like-minded thinker, I guess, and Muralar were very concerned and we talked a lot about the sustainable goals at Finca, 17 of them, and in particular two of them, number four and eight, that do include microfinance on one hand and on the other hand, learning, education, making sure that we do have qualified workforces in the countries working through things like e-learning, blended learning, and especially mobile learning because this is the only way in many of these countries to allow a lot of excluded persons from education to get access to quality education in the future. So thank you very much for listening and questions, please. If you're interested in learning more about microfinance from a business case and also from a social performance case, I definitely encourage you to talk more to Sergio about their work. I had like six really important things that I was going to ask. I guess what I'll just, what I will say is I think one important takeaway from this is, in the beginning you talked a lot about the business case for mobile learning and I would encourage people in this room, especially partners, to think about expansion into the rest of the world from most social performance case but also from a business case. Just because you're working with clients in Africa doesn't mean you're doing it as charity necessarily. There's a big need for that. But there also are strong business cases. If you're not tapping into what's going on in Nigeria and Ethiopia, then you're missing out on huge, huge markets for mobile learning, for SMS-based learning. And I guess that's the question. So one question I will ask is, in expanding your platform for financial education, have you looked at all at the limitations around SMS-based learning? Because there's still a large segment of your population that's not working on smartphones. It's still using, and SMS-based learning has been expanding. And I haven't seen a while ago I did some research into whether Moodle had any partners or plugins that supported SMS learning. And I didn't find anything. Is that something you've looked into at all? Yes. We have done some research. Thank you, Margaret, for this question. That's a great question. And what we have found, at least among thinker customers, is that there is at least one person in the household, in the family, mostly the youngsters, right, the teenagers who do own a mobile phone. And what we see also happening is that it is the teenagers, right, that often do advise their parents simply because they have a better background, a better education. They do know where to get the information. So, dad or mom understands how to deal better with the bank, right? So, many of these customers stay excluded from financial services because they're simply shy or not self-confident enough to deal with the bank. Certainly not a mainstream bank, but also microfinance banks like Thinker. So, this is where the financial education is coming in and we hope that the younger generation will be the catalyst, so to say, to educate the older generation that probably will stay, many of them, excluded forever from technology for one reason or the other. Thank you very much.