 I'm here at the ITU in Geneva and I'm very pleased to be joined by Sacha Pulverini who's Chairman of the Digital Financial Services Focus Group. Sacha, welcome and thank you very much indeed for joining us here today. Thanks for having me. So today's the final meeting of the Focus Group. Could you please explain to our viewers how this Focus Group came to be and what are some of the main achievements and outcomes of the Focus Group? Absolutely. So the Focus Group started in 2014 and today is really the last meeting of this initiative. We had seven meetings altogether over the period of two years. And this is an important event today because we are really wrapping up and closing a very intense and constructive project which was in a way started as an experiment. The Focus Group on Digital Financial Services for Financial Inclusion was created and developed to achieve three main objectives. On the one hand, we wanted to really make sure that telecommunication authorities and regulators who play a significant role in promoting digital finance were aware of their capabilities and responsibilities in this debate. We normally tend to interact with financial services regulators, minister of finance, central banks. But as we speak of digital financial services, the digital component is playing an important role, hence the increasing attention to the telecommunication authorities. And it's a question of really understanding what roles and responsibilities they play compared to their opposite number at the central bank. So we're certainly not saying that there should be a recalibration of roles and responsibilities, but there's a need for a dialogue between two different categories of regulators that in general don't tend to speak a lot, one with the other. So the objective of this initiative was to create a forum, a platform where telecommunication authorities can meet with financial services authorities and they also can interact with the private sector. So raising awareness was a second objective. So really understanding what kind of level of information is there, I mean, do telecommunication authorities know about financial exclusion? Do they know that in some of their countries, a high level of the population, a high percentage of the population is excluded from former financial services and we can reach up to 70, 80 percent of the population on having access to a transaction account? So that has been an important objective to achieve. And the third one, given that we have so many stakeholders in the same room from the private sector and the public sector, was really taking the opportunity to identify a number of key issues that are currently preventing a digital financial services ecosystem from developing and analyze those issues, share experiences and best practices from both the public sector and the private sector, understanding what challenges are both categories of stakeholders facing and see whether we can come up with some solution. And so the opportunity of being in the same room on a regular basis, and of course we had seven in-person meetings, but there were a lot of conferences calls and e-meetings that allowed the work to progress in between face-to-face meetings. All that interaction allowed a lot of information to be exchanged and best practices to be shared and that led to sets of reports and recommendations. So the outcomes of the focus group are pretty encouraging and I think this is a very successful initiative if we compare to the objectives that we initially set. So the information, the awareness, the dialogue and the opportunity to address some of these issues in a concrete way. So we have almost 27 reports that have been produced over the period of two years. So very intense work from all participants of the working groups and the focus group in general on different themes and subjects. So from B2B to government, to people payment, to networks and financial inclusion. So we really try to look at different angles of the same topic and create a landscape and really provide evidence of what is really happening in the market. We also did some interesting mystery shopping activities in a couple of African countries just to understand how customers really perceive digital financial services and what is their experience and whether there is anything that can be improved so that their experience is much more improved, easy and they are much more interested in using these products and services. So the results in terms of deliverable of the focus group is these 27 reports that create the foundation for policy recommendations that really are aimed at policy makers and regulators around the world. And the reason why we worked on this policy recommendation particularly in 2016 is to fast track policy reform in a number of these emerging markets. So we know that sooner or later markets face the same issues, data protection for example or consumer protection or how can consumers have a recourse and what kind of instruments are available or the reflection about deposit insurance is the mobile wallet and mobile money can see that as sort of deposit and so should be subject to the same regulations. We had all these discussions and certainly from the experience that all the participants have from their respective jurisdictions and markets and their own countries, we really extracted all the key messages and tried to see what can we provide to the regulators and policy makers to help them making a better job and really fast track policy reform because we realized that sooner or later they will face the same issues and rather than reinventing the wheel, can we offer them something off the shelf that can be then adapted and redefined, adjusted to the local reality to take into account the specific situation they face but also allow them to accelerate the process and rather than doing mystery shopping themselves, we have done that for them. Rather than doing consultation, we have done that for them. Rather than calling expert, we have done that for them. So this is a way to help them and really give them tools to do better their job. And going through some of your reports, we've seen that there are still roughly two billion people who remain unbanked. What are some of the lessons learned and some of the obstacles that still remain in the face of a widespread adoption of digital financial services across the globe? So there are various obstacles and issues, of course. And although I think the work that the focus group has done would be really instrumental to make progress and move the needle, it's still a drop in the sea. I mean, there's a lot that needs to be done. And we need to also bear in mind that every jurisdiction is different. Every market has its own situations, conditions and characteristics, cultural, legal, in terms of industry, how the industry is organized, the incentives, the appeal of the market for new investments. So there are many obstacles in terms of market access. So allowing particularly non-financial institution to be able to provide digital financial services and mobile money services to the unbanked or the population in general. We have issues about the organization and the management of the agent network, which is a key pillar for the success of digital financial services, particularly for the poor, because they need to be able to access agent services in a real proximity. So the whole issue is to replace the old banking system that is based on brick and mortar branches with a network of hundreds of thousands of agents within the territory of a country, so that they can offer cash in and cash out services. So having that network in place is essential for the success of any digital financial services strategy, particularly pursuing financial inclusion objectives. So these are also still on the table as issues. And the more and more the market becomes sophisticated, the more and more people rely on digital financial services and mobile money services, then you have issues emerging in terms of consumer protection, protection of funds in terms of data protections and security of the system. So we have a situation where a number of countries have addressed some of these issues successfully, but we can't say there's a fully perfect market, there's no market that is really working well on all these issues. So there are always some gaps and some flaws. So we're trying to provide solutions to fill those gaps and address those flaws. So there's been a lot of important work in the group, but we're coming to the end of the study period, if you will. What would you say are some of the next steps for the group and how can we turn these reports and recommendations into action, if you will? So this is an important question because certainly, particularly from my perspective as a chair, I'd like to see all this work put at risk. And so really I'd like to see this being helpful for both the industry but also the public sector regulators. So we don't want these guidelines and principles and recommendation to stay on the shelf and get dusted. I mean, they need to be used and they need to be implemented. And of course, implementation doesn't mean that they always bring good results. So there's tests and learning and measurement that needs to take place there. So in terms of the next step, I think that we have a pretty good overview now of what the issues are in various markets and also in an abstract way in general. You know where the bottlenecks are, what are the challenges for consumer, for the industry to make it digital financial service scalable and profitable. I think we need to move to the implementation phase. We need to try and see how this solution can really make a difference and allow government achieving their own objectives in terms of financial inclusion. So what will come next is probably an initiative that we'll see, again, a number of these parties getting together and work on specific countries to implement policy recommendation that were developed by this group. But we will also take advantage of work done by the World Bank and the CPMI through the Payment Asset for Financial Inclusion Task Force, the PAFI report, which also includes a number of principles and guidelines. So we want to take all this work done, which is consistently done. So we are now going in different directions. We seem to be fairly aligned in terms of approach and where we're going. And really look at the implementation phase. So we need to move away from the diagnostic kind of situation and we don't need to understand what problems are again. We need to find real solutions. So the initiative that will follow up to the focus group will still involve the ITU but a set of other organization and it will be a multi-partisan effort over a period of three years with a work stream looking at the implementation of this guidelines and recommendation. So with projects to increase quality of service for the signal or making sure that the payment infrastructure is really performing as we need for low-value transactions or in a cost-effective way. But at the same time, what we realize has been extremely helpful and very valuable within this focus group is the exchange of information, is the knowledge sharing between parties that they don't tend to get together very often. And so it's not just the central banks and telecommunication authorities but it's the car business, the financial industry business, it's the MNOs, it's the aggregators, it's the platform providers. So the richness of this initiative which is really unique and we haven't seen this anywhere else and the technicality of the debate that we've managed to achieve is something that we want to continue going forward. So as one work stream will look at the implementation, another work stream will continue this debate on some of the issues for which we haven't found proper solutions and will continue the analysis and over a period of three years the two work streams should converge and just summarize what have been learned from the experience on the ground and from the analysis and research on the other side. Okay, Satya, well that was very interesting and I wish you the best of luck with the next phase of the work and also a successful meeting and workshop in the next couple of days. So thank you for your time. Thank you very much.