Creating Equitable Access to the Global Financial System

[Music] thank you victoria good morning afternoon and evening to all and welcome uh to the european blockchain convention 2021 we've had a great start to the day and it's just about to get a whole lot better with the lineup we have in store for you all now i'll be your moderator for this session my name is shrez ahmed and i wear two hats one being the head of business development of the crypto valley association a non-profit organization that supports the ever-growing blockchain based community worldwide and the other being the managing partners from partners and all-in-one solution provider to this ecosystem full of challenges gathered here today are representatives of bodies that were established to protect the people and support through means of nonprofits the communities they govern during this panel we're going to be talking about how to create equitable access to the global financial system first we'll start with a round of introductions then get straight into the heart of this interesting topic and after proceed with a q a to all of you listening so don't hesitate to ask your questions in the chat bar below all right so uh ladies first uh daniella dixon uh ceo of the stella development foundation would you like to kick us off with a little introduction about who you are and maybe a little bit about the foundation as well that's great thank you so much i love what you say that we're here for the people uh so my name is danelle dixon i'm the ceo and executive director of the stellar development foundation uh seller uh the sdf is a non-profit non-stock entity that's focused solely on the mission that is very aligned with this topic which is creating equitable access to the global financial system uh we do that through the development and shepherding the code base for what's what's called the stellar network uh stellar is an open decentralized permissionless network that is already creating equitable access by having all these really wonderful and fascinating innovative companies building on top of it and being able to focus on the regions in which they uh live in to create this uh to enhance the existing rails of the global financial system and to make it so that it's a lot smoother and borderless thank you look forward to this thank you thank you daniel um great and so next up my santa maria the head of financial advisory team of the republic of ireland would you like to present yourself thank you so much um sir i'm sure us and uh thanks to victoria and danielle to to have me again um at the epc it's nice to to actually be back participating in a panel and not moderating so you're doing well shiraz um i uh for those of you who've probably seen me or heard me already uh talk at the ebc um um i am a recovering banker um i stole that line from julian um i spent over 20 years in in the private sector uh but i've uh seconded to the department of finance i've been working with the finance um minister in in dublin in ireland for the last almost four years now um why am i even sitting in this panel discussion here i guess is because of the work um and initiative that we've been part of over the last year so the the minister was invited to be part of the world economic forum the wf digital currency governance consortium and as part of that um consortium we've been looking at um the utilizations and application of stablecoins to cross-border aid um so i think this has been quite aligned to the work that both the dm foundation and style organization have been doing um and i'm really looking forward to to discuss this with them because certainly um it's opened up my eyes to a lot of things over the last year thanks thank you and last but not least uh jan lokok and the director of policy of the dm association you're up thank you thank you shiraz and it's an honor and a privilege to be with uh mai and danelle and and for the invite i'm joining you today from washington dc where uh prior the past 20 months a rocket ship ride with the libra slash dm project i spent a decade at the federal deposit insurance corporation uh regulating uh more than five thousand banks so fairly familiar with uh the modern financial system and all of its uh challenges and opportunities that we have faced today i guess uh in every aspect of our lives during this uh uh unprecedented and it seems to be coming to a new normal uh covert crisis the role of technology for household and business and uh government continuity has really been core and essential um it's true in perhaps every aspect of our lives from how the internet and communication has been a lifesaver over the past year to stay connected with with friends family and work the one exception uh and why i'm so excited to to have such experts like my and danelle today and shiraz you moderating uh the exception i see is the way we transfer value and so very much looking forward to our discussion today on on bringing modern financial access to uh the more than three billion individuals that are either unbanked don't have a bank account or underbanked that leverage alternative financial services so really excited to be here today thank you thank you julian and thank you all for that short but sweet uh introductions and so so let's dive straight in and maybe uh daniele from the stellar foundation you can tell me a little bit more about how you're seeking to unblock the world's economic potential by making money more fluid markets more open and people more empowered and can you speak about some of the tangible actions you're taking to do so um i think you're on mute unfortunately look at that i was trying to be respectful and i did the worst thing ever um thanks so much for that question it's uh what we are um we're really focused on really creating and building this ecosystem and the thing that we need is like the the improvement of network effects so that you know once you bring we have lots of financial systems that are part of the stellar network these financial systems sit on the edges of the network and are the on and off ramps and they actually issue stable coins so they're one-to-one fiat-backed coins that are being able to be utilized not just in the region in which they sit they can be utilized everywhere but they can also be an off-ramp so that folks can go in and just redeem their assets for the local fiat if they need to so these financial institutions one of the most important things to to be able to need for the network is these financial systems everywhere we have about 20 different geographies covered now we need more and so there's a lot of focus and attention that we bring to just bringing these different financial institutions on in every region they're the ones who create the innovation they're the ones who actually focus on the regional issues and they know how to solve those problems regionally much better than we do but we actually provide the infrastructure and support for them to be able to do it so what sdf is truly focused on right now is uh helping these corridors that have already started to grow we have some in nigeria and the us we have corridors between mexico and the us and then mexico and nigeria argentina nigeria and then also europe these corridors we need to bring more volume to them so that they can actually increase the uh the um options for those that are participating there but the really awesome thing that's happening is with this regional focus and with uh these entities that are building regionally and in a permissionless way on the network they actually are able to solve these real financial issues for their local residents and their businesses so small to medium-sized businesses as well uh so that they can actually become part of this global financial structure that we all talk about and yet it's really hard to get access to so just from the simplest thing of transferring value from nigeria to europe now can be done in three seconds on the network and it is done every day so the corridor between brazil and um and the us and brazil and nigeria opening up as well and those are also the transfer of value in three seconds uh it's pretty phenomenal to see and it makes us really happy to be able to be a part of it now i'm looking forward to speaking more about some of these corridors that you mentioned um a little bit later on in the conversation but uh my um your team provides research and input to policy options would you be able to provide the audience maybe with some clarity towards what the republic of ireland's current stance on digital assets and blockchain technology is and whether there are any initiatives being taken within ireland to promote equitable access on a national scale okay those are very very big questions um um let me one at a time in terms of speaking to policy um unfortunately i don't have the minister's job so the only person who really can speak to policy would be the minister but um even though ireland i mean let me maybe backtrack a little bit onto that why would even ireland be looking at the digital currency um uh governance uh consortium initiative um well it particularly because it looks at a project about bringing in an organized organizing private and uh public um initiatives together into a dialogue and actually really effectively what daniella has actually described in terms of building that that network and that's of interest because um even though ireland is such a small country and uh for those of you who have watched the the ted's chat you might know that um it is the number one country in terms of aid being disbursed um so you know we are a nation of givers um so clearly there's an interest of well that money that we give where does it go and are we making are we making the most out of the money so so that's that's certainly there's an interest in there um and you know there's no doubt about it it's just like we want to understand and what we're doing can we do it better and there's better ways to do it and at the same time really building the sustainability um for not just the the improving the infrastructure which is needed cross-border but really what can we really do in terms of innovation um to to maybe just eradicate the need to that transfer to happen in the first place um that's totally different um sure as to your question around the uh the policy or how ireland as an economy might actually look at digital assets um you know it's not that just apples and oranges but um we as a country as you know on monitor monetary policy that's totally linked up to to the euro this european union and we're participating to the market in crypto assets and draft regulation proposals as you know they're ongoing so um and we've we've embraced blockchain in ireland from from from earlier on the blockchain island community has been ongoing um with all the the community participants for for years now so um there's not much i can say there really is like it's not like we've taken a set back or we're not actually discussing it at all i mean and i think even me being here on on this um part of this panel is this part of this continued commitment to learn and quite frankly you have to continuously because there's always something new to learn from it um so does that answer your question i hope he does um and there's not much more i can do because i said you know for in terms of of policy there's a lot that will happen um i think in in the context of the writer framework european union you have fantastic speakers that will be um do a much better job than i will be i think you have peter kirsten you have john jensen uh jason um um i think you have peter silgatis as well they're all actually um i mean and this is the european blockchain convention um a virtual conference anyway so i know we're they're speaking at that so i think they they will be able to to give you a bit more bone and i wouldn't want to be stealing their thunder on their european policy on digital assets um and what it means to us and particularly when it comes to the critical access to finance um i really do think it's about this you know and i said i'll go back to this point of we are an agent of givers and we have embraced innovation um and it all go back to a little bit of history as well as you know there's there's four and a half but say five and a half six million people living in ireland there's over 40 um irish passports in the world um a lot of the irish communities have survived over the years thanks to the remittances you know these have been the the immigrants the irish immigrants going to australia and the united states and so forth and sending this money back so we are a society that has been built thanks to that um help so i think this there is an unconscious knowledge of the importance of doing that and if there's a better way of doing and building that and not providing leakage then we should definitely be part of building that absolutely great thank you man yeah i i agree with you guys to the educational side and he definitely put a lot of meat to the bone there so i really appreciate that that part um um and and and durian we were discussing this the other day saying that there are a lot of different uh solutions but we need to provide a safe way to allow the consumer to do what they want to do and to allow them further optionality i mean how is the dm association supporting this and uh yeah thank you shiraz and i see you're certainly throwing up fastballs to us today so i think we appreciate it i'm going to build on what danelle used the term option and then my uh spoke about public-private partnership it's clear that if history is any indicator of large-scale type of changes the sentiment that we are feeling today we we've seen in the past and i think public-private partnership is a great example such as the advent of the internet and what internet did to democratize uh information and communication flows if we think back uh just even recently the transition from uh kind of the the cash over to the inability to write checks then from checks to the charge card to the debit card to the credit card moving on to plastic that that occurred 70 years ago um payment systems today very much looked like the telecoms did 30 years ago and i think that this sentiment is starting to grow where consumers should be able to uh use the means that they prefer and so even today access let alone access to to to credit is is far from ubiquitous uh it is certain that you should as a consumer have uh the option to pay a merchant uh with cash or with any other means that you choose so i think what we see here is a natural progression from plastic to digital and it's really not to disrupt the industry uh but it is really to complete uh some of the payment cycle and lower some of the the fees my uh talked about uh remittances and remittance uh corridors even smart remittance corridors are right around the four and a half percent uh fee range uh the fees has really almost been flat for the past decade right around nine ten percent uh about a year and a half ago it was at seven percent the latest world bank data from end of last year dropped it to six point eight percent but uh short of large-scale innovation we won't get to the united nations sustainable development goals of dropping it to uh three percent in the next nine years so i think uh having this all ships rising moment uh as i call it with uh folks whether it's from uh the irish central bank uh or or other uh central bank around the world working with uh fintech uh firms uh i think it's just a benefit for consumers to be able to use the type of payments that want and certainly what i think is the most important uh lifeblood of of the world are these remittances that uh let's be honest are used for shelter for food for security for protection a 700 billion um markets every year uh should be prioritized to lower these uh remittance fees for those that are in most need of them thank you shiva ask there's i'm just trying to imagine would actually be on a panel discussion it might be a bit easier and i'd have maybe julian to my left or right and and there's two things that he said that i think there's i really like to to ping it back maybe team sav and also to danelle as well is um i mean the title of today's discussion really is about these um equitable access to to finance and i think it's a very important um angle to it that i had not appreciated until i started being part of this initiative which is there are elements of the global finance that are not that pretty so maybe there is a chance to certainly allow for that access maybe to the best parts of finance so let me explain to that um i think it would be unfair maybe to allow for a better payment rails and access to finance what it means to if it means access to credit that's great but if that leads to a whole new um cohort of the society in in the world that end up in debt or unable to pay um their credit fees that is not what we want um there is an element of can we use that innovation maybe to actually build out the prettiest sites of the global finance and this is maybe use programming program mobile uh sorry programmable money to allow um better ways of savings or allow microfinance kpis of sorts to actually help a female entrepreneurs to build up a query portfolio those are this for me and that's maybe it's a challenge or i don't know what julian and janelle and think about this but having been in private sector and having seen the the darkest side of the finance yeah this has been the you clearly the the increase in credit the mortgage payments rears and so forth those areas that clearly have been created partly because of the finance system and how it works is there is there a role for blockchain for stable coins for what we're doing here for what we're trying to do to really focus on the prettier sides of that finance that can actually take us and i mean you know julian you've you've mentioned for example the the sdgs i can think of three or four sdgs that would probably benefit um of more interaction and more work towards building out that nicer site of finance yeah i mean i think my i think the issue is so much about like the the localization needs and what the region itself needs because not every region needs access at least not to the level that we have in certain countries to all of these opportunities to become more and more in debt but for example if you take a company that's building on stellar called d stock they are you can actually purchase stock that's on the american stock exchange you can now purchase it anywhere in the world using your sir wallet and you can purchase a quarter of a share of anything so now blue chip stock can be available those are kind of things that allow for these individuals to be become more empowered and to be able to invest and to save money in different ways than they ever had an opportunity to just from their wallet from their um from the wallet on the phone none of this can actually come though without education so i think that with with the opportunity to be able to deliver these really fascinating different uh innovations to individuals all over the world you have to simultaneously bring them education so that they can understand what they're you know what they're getting into and they don't need to know that it's blockchain by the way i'm not focusing on the blockchain technology component focusing on that financial component so that it'll it again empowers them and brings them the opportunity to do these things that are new to them but bring real value and opportunity for them to save in completely different ways so i i love my that you went with the nice side of finance and the not so nice of finance i i really care about the nice side of finance i guess and one of the things i saw with the dm project that i thought was was really impactful uh for the nice side of finance uh which to me is you know the payment rails and and things are kind of kind of basic is the interoperability and the open source code and i think the open source cord and interoperability bring kind of two uh there are two big ways that how that is going to advance the market and help the the nice side of finance one uh by pulling more people into the modern financial economy very very similar to how the internet did for uh e-learning and for access to this uh information that individuals around the world may not have uh have been access to in in the past and on the open source side of things you know individuals over time will be able to build on uh the dm network and if you take a look at traditional systems even the nice side of finance traditional systems what you've seen is a replication of siloed solutions and they typically don't talk well to one another they don't transact well with one another and from a consumer and a merchant perspective that's where i think we have a lot of friction uh and where costs uh grow and grow so i think with the the dm project the interoperability uh is certainly something that is meant to to help the nice side of finance with uh digital payment rails thank you guys very interesting thank you um jane and and my you mentioned uh a little bit about how country uh we speak a lot about the unbanked um but rarely do we speak about the underbanked and danielle touched upon it a little bit before would you be able to share a little bit uh with the uh the audience uh why this group of individuals could be the most in need of the solution blockchain technology provides so to me yeah yeah i mean i i i certainly can kick off i think i think maybe julian and danelle would be much better placed um i mean top of my head and i said i for me i'm completely novice in this area i've only been um dipping my toes in the wf initiative this last year so there is largely i think is 1.7 billion unbanked um but i think that's an important point um i think it's important as you can you know having access to banking facilities but i think as with all the old high level numbers sometimes they kind of escape the reality or some people may not have a bank account um because they're actually there's no real tangible infrastructure you know if you live in one of the many thousand uh islands in vanuatu you might not actually have access to to bank account and it's all cash local currency so there's probably a bit of a misnomer and what attracted me to the initiative yes the unbanked i think it's important um but it's probably more the the amount of funds needed to to really help when it comes to humanitarian aid so and in terms of numbers i remember high level um maybe was 2018 2019 it was definitely over 30 billion dollars needed really to cover humanitarian needs across the world is a big number um and as far as i know only half of that was actually ever met um some of these community humanitarian needs um were obviously as a result of crisis so it could potentially be that somebody did have a bank account but because of you know an earthquake or a flood or whatever it was there was no access to that um but then there were people really clear that did not have maybe they were you know victims of of misplacement due to civil wars or hunger um and they'd never had a bank account at all so then how do you go about to actually disburse that cash and into into that into that person in its hand so um the the large that the bulk of of of funds needed to actually meet those in the context for example of the um sdgs i thought it was large incredibly large and that was way before even kovit kicked off um so if anything um the pandemic has actually made the gap between the total value of money needed for humanitarian needs um and what's available even larger um that doesn't mean it's uncertain mountable and that's one of the things maybe i've learned through the initiative is um crypto philanthropy and so you know like this justice denali was actually you mentioning the fact that um this you know pretty much through the work that they're doing and this global infrastructure that you might want to go in and invest in stocks all over the world with blockchain you open up the potential to people also if they want directly donate to any organization or anywhere else or any course quickly all over the world um and it's not uh and it's not a dream you know like maybe you read it then shiraz and uh maybe julian knows better than me i think a couple of weeks ago there was an article saying that um i mean it was it was a quick it was a quick um survey 65 percent of people um who were deemed to receive one of those um eight financial help checks in the us were going to or willing to invest um that in crypto whether it be bitcoin or otherwise i mean i mean this is a huge um a huge percentage right now if 65 of these people are gonna take their fifteen hundred dollars and check um knew and were willing and understood really what they could do with that if they're willing to take 65 and directly put it in crypto they could easily just put 10 or 15 directly to you know um and help cover that that gap and the same goes i think with it's not not obviously not just humanitarian aid so um i i suppose maybe i said with my really novice and i'm certainly not the expert and i'm going to leave it now to julian and danielle to fill in my my poor understanding is um the gap is high it's big sorry um but what i've seen uh working with initiatives with the wf is that that gap can be filled in and could be closed not just by improving the process of making the transactions faster and more cost effective but also by actually allowing say donors to provide funds and also to get repeat recipients to actually get them in a simpler way so and i think that that's the that is the one side of it from the humanitarian side of it and then if you think about it from the unbanked or under-banked component of it where they actually just don't have access to banks in their in the village that they live in or in the city that they live in and they have to even money when money's transferred it's like it's driven from place to place versus and the ways that we're used to it um here in in for for me in california um i i there's so many of these companies and this is why i keep focusing on the local piece of it for example in sub-saharan africa it's the highest globally to send money uh and yet many africans that live away from home still do that money transfer but there's a company called uhuru wallet that is in south africa but they have markets in ghana nigeria and kenya they've built on stellar to be able to offer these wallets to migrant workers so that those workers who are normally excluded from the financial system because they can't get access to bank accounts maybe they just don't have them in their area or they actually can't because they don't have the credit needs to be able to demonstrate that they can have now a wallet on their phone that they can actually receive these transfers quickly but mostly they can receive them safely and hold them in digital assets so that they don't have to worry about having them in their home carrying them around with them they're in their their on their digital assets on their phones so these are the kinds of things like it's really hard for us to sit where we sit and to know what people need in every geography this the notion of open source the notion of um interoperability the notion of allowing these innovations to happen locally really changes this dynamic so that we can get to the unbanked in very different ways than we could historically just one more thing for us because i think denial and and my really covered well on the unbanked underbank the opportunity here is uh the unbanked and underbanked have smartphones uh and they find ways to get connected to the internet and if you take a look the best use case that i think a lot of times we think in oh we could you know very lofty aspirational type goals for the unbanked underbank but if we look at kenya and empeza and what they've managed to do in a decade it's staggering especially uh women's access to to financial services which are typically disappropriate uh to to men they've really been able to cut from 85 percent of unbanked underbank down to about 10 15 percent almost overnight with with m pesa and so this is really where innovation uh plays a big role in being able to uh really democracize access to to financial services and short of large-scale innovation we're not going to get there which is why these discussions are so important and why we finally have a technology in blockchain to me blockchain starts with a b because it's also banking right the blockchain technology i promise you in about three four years uh we're not going to talk about the technology itself which is super complex which is now in its third or fourth version since bitcoin uh and uh satoshi nakamoto came out with it a little over a decade ago very similar to the way we're having this phone call today is anybody right now thinking about the little packets that get broken down into splits that go into a dsl line that go into a t1 line that go under the atlantic in one of those fiber cables we don't think about it we just expect it to work and so i really believe blockchain is going to fade in their background and we'll have concrete discussions about the real business cases to drive down the unbacked and underbanked which between friends it's not just individuals south of the mediterranean in europe you have two out of 10 europeans that either choose not to have a bank account or don't have enough money for a bank account or scared of some of the fees and then you have china that has the largest about 250 million chinese don't have a bank account so this is not just a southern mediterranean challenge this is a global challenge we're taking technology can really help thank you that's amazing point i am wary of the time as we have some uh questions uh coming in but really i think what will you mention being an all ships rising moment and uh just all of it in general is wonderful to hear maybe i start off uh with a question from ricardo garcia ruiz who mentioned in the context of the emergence of cbdcs what role would crypt will crypto currency based payment instruments play um please feel free um yeah so i'm not sure i exactly understand the the the based instruments like how they how to think about that but with cbdc's uh and the issuance of cbdc's hopefully um in an interoperable way i think it'll just really empower this system that we're trying to push i agree with julian that i think that we're no longer and we shouldn't actually i don't i don't like to do it today to talk about blockchain so much as i like to talk about the use cases as you can probably tell because from my standpoint that's actually the real focus so cbdc's are just going i hope that there's a public to private partnership where the the countries that are issuing cbdc's are working with the private institutions who have already developed a lot of these really innovative plays on how to actually get these cbdc's out into the world because the truth is like for example the fed here in the u.s they don't have a relationship with consumers but the private companies do and they already do this through the existing banking infrastructure so they can do the same here so have the cbdc's issued working with the private entities who can be interoperable across many chains for example it allows for these instruments for you to be able to make payments to do transfers to be able to leverage all these cool financial instruments that are out there in the world using something that you're comfortable with because you know that it's one to one backed and it's backed by a government and so i think that this is really the next level innovation that we're seeing and i'm hoping to see maybe even by the end of this year beginning of next year that we see this actually come to fruition and i'm just really fighting really hard with the with those governments to really work with the private sector so that they can leverage that really great institutional knowledge of how it works i i'll just i was just going to say yes i'm nodding i'm not in here like a popping but i i couldn't agree more i mean everybody wants this to happen and wants to happen fast and i think uh once there's an agreement um clearly the right way to go about it would be to utilize the private sector rails are currently out there whether they're new about but clearly like um the new ones are working would be ideal to use right um if the question is meant and i'm i'm just reading it there and um the stable conceptivity see it's an element of maybe thinking that um even two to three years time there's a digital dollar or digital euro what's the point of stable coins today yeah i mean i don't know whether maybe that's directed and a dm uh to you julian if that's the case i would say maybe stable coins or any other uh with the pdm of others would probably just be an in-between to that uh retail cpc if that ever happens or maybe it's the opposite the cbdc retail actually ends up back in um being morphed in the private sector um you know supported global private coin that actually is it's up and running and working uh we don't know but i do think that we will have to start talking about blockchain the same way that we start talking about wi-fi now we just book hotels depending on whether the access you know the service is there or not and we stopped talking about it i think that that's very important um maybe just um um linking up to that as well it's just uh and i totally agree with you danielle janelle is that it it's about regional and i think there is an element of really um not every country is in the right place you know um when it comes to to the strength there are of their currency and there's an element of certain steps that can be there but the one thing i actually have learned as that without participating in this year's initiative is that interestingly enough what blockchain technology projects projects have done in some countries is have actually leapfrogged those um countries and those um governments to understand the technology better in other countries that maybe are more traditional uh or maybe more to have more um built out banking sectors and that means for example i mean i take for example the the kiva protocol in in sierra leone um allowing for um for administration to really deliver something that in a more developed country would actually take three or four years of all regulatory barriers to actually seep through so it's not just the payment piece but it's just the technology the internal interoperability of it and getting the administrations of countries with those pilots are happening leapfrogging that knowledge and understanding the technology i think that's really going to make a difference when it comes to um to utilizing stable coins um or cbc as the case may be in those countries i can't agree with you more and i'll just say that i feel like what we need to be thinking about with all these different countries because regulation is the thing that could actually harm the the growth of this if regulation is done without really thinking through the whole infrastructure but what we need to be thinking and we need to be getting those governments and those and folks to think is by missing out on the blockchain opportunity what are they not allowed being able to bring to their constituents because that's the way to think about it not like what's the harm that's going to happen but what's the opportunity that you're forgoing because you're not allowing it so that's how we try to shape for freight that art frame that argument a little bit thank you and i'm just going to add one thing because clearly going after mai and danelle is really tough you guys covered so much and instead of diving into cbdc's i think the challenge that we're going to see is how do you balance a vigorously competitive wallet environment and a financial services environment that has same risks same rules and i think that now you just alluded to you know is it possible for us to have this kind of global regulation uh and we have as you know fative put out some guidance the fsb puts out some guidance and you have great bodies that product guidance but we might not see a global um understanding uh and a clear guidance moving forward therefore at the local level it'll be really interesting to see who accelerates uh uh quicker than others and we're certainly seeing with nine out of ten central banks uh that are either researching looking into a project we have a couple central banks that already have pilots that are out there so certainly it's it's here for us to say but inherently inherently if you look at uh central banks they operate with private sector banks so they're they're non-market-based and if you look at the cost today it's about a half a percent of gdp uh is what uh countries pay to manage physical cash it's expensive to store money it's expensive to destroy money it's expensive to print money it's expensive to transport money and therefore with with stable cooling construct and that's why this public private partnership i think is so critical and having these type of discussions are so critical because blockchain is here to stay digital currencies are here to stay even if we saw this meteoritic uh rise over the past year we still have options for the consumer which was kind of the outside of my my talk here but certainly uh uh central banks have a role to play in uh this all ships rising moment thank you thank you um and i would go to the the many other questions that we have in the chat although i am wary of the time and i think we have around 47 seconds left but maybe um my then now maybe you'd like to to add one last part um apparently five more minutes so i think oh five minutes okay um yeah sure i'll i'll take one purely because um i just um i think it's from uh claudia polymanti um and the question is about uh transferring funds and banked phones and areas well listen the the necessity of of a smartphone um and it says a smartphone not not not a feature phone sorry for this movie i've just realized that i have the question but not everybody might have the question so the question is how the panels see the implementation of using the money in environments without proper infrastructure i mean connection or business that allowed digital payments like people argentina and so forth so what i would say to claudia paulimante is that this is um an area that the the digital um um currency governance consortium has been looking at and i think there's going to be 10 to 12 different um papers um issued later this summer so to be keep an eye on the wf website there'll be plenty to to cover in this but i mean both julian and i'm sure danielle will have something to say that the reason why i wanted to pick up that question is because we've looked at both um i i was lucky enough to listen in and and hear about several um initiatives and not always as we know them people have access to a smartphone sometimes the phone phones are just feature phones and top of my head i'm thinking of for example um one of the the uh the oxfam uh project um in in vanuatu where effectively um nfc uh disposable sorry biodegradable non-branded nfc cards were actually used and the money was actually um sorry the money was actually backed um i think it was die at the top of my head if i if if i think correctly but at least the money was actually put on on those cards and it was just the merchants in the shops that really needed that phone so people themselves do not need the phone and in some cases there are no wi-fi connections um there's a few countries for example in africa that there might be one smartphone or one feature phone for the com for the family and four or five different sim cards and people really just go back to actually use a sim card um but if you're if you're able to just have one app on the phone um that's probably just enough and an example of that is the valora app again and the project that everything they did in the philippines and pretty much they looked at i think um a high percentage of the 100 odd um people that they that were part of the cohort did have um feature phones but maybe they only had four or five apps and that was just enough for them to know how to do download one and use i know how to use this one so as long as there is some some level of connection i think that's that's needed an interesting thing is pretty much mobile coverage is pretty much easier to get that it would never be to to get um anything else and i think that's where the technology of blockchain piggy banking of that is important um the point though is of interoperability not just having the phone um and i mean i would totally not be the person talking about danielle and julian to talk about that but um claudia mentioned peru argentina the inter-development bank i think the lack chain effectively have such a project um in place it's pretty much a cross-border blockchain platform for those cross-border payments um it's just check it up online and particularly they're looking at south south america so um clarity i hope that that gives you enough to to answer that question and if i could just jump in and say i'm going to put my mozilla hat back on from the from years ago when i was there because the focus here is it's not just access to the blockchain infrastructure that we think is important it's also access to wi-fi technologies and so that's something that we also continually have to work on with governments in all of these regions to be able to spend the infrastructure money on creating these these access points for everyone so there's a lot of things we need to do and that's one of them and that also allows that this technology will even be more and more useful to folks and i guess i'll just add one thing now that i realized that there are all these questions in the chat and i think my you actually did a great job at answering three other questions from one person so i think our audience is thinking about the same thing which is fantastic the only one thing i'm going to add around interoperability is imagine a world where i'm at a certain email domain and i try to send you just a basic email and you're at a different domain and it takes three to five business days um and i have to pay a fee for you to see my email you know quicker currently that's the way the financial system traditional financial system operates and nobody would stand by that if i sent you an email i had to pay for you to see it see it quicker and if you look at transaction times and settlement times you know when you go to your favorite local uh coffee shop like i did this morning for four cups of coffee thankfully i have free refills uh but um you go and when i swipe my my credit card uh or i use my my spark mark smartphone um they wait four or five business days to actually have the funds in in their account where i'm a super happy consumer it takes me 10 15 seconds and i walk away i think with innovation and with stable coins the merchants can actually have their funds in 30 seconds instead of four or five business days so i really think that the innovation is here i really think that consumers want the optionality and at the end of the day the infrastructure whether it is uh built or being built i believe it was uh uh danelle you talked about leapfrogging uh some technologies and if you go in latin america there was a question about how would peru and argentina kind of leverage some of the new innovation well truth is they leapfrog technologies you go there and you don't see telephone poles and electrical poles and they decided to just skip straight to satellite which is fantastic it is really a moment in time where we could leverage innovation to make a real dent in unbanked and underpacked great thank you thank you julian and i see victoria has popped up uh so i guess we are out of time but i think we could have gone on for much longer but thank you all for those amazing uh comments and having responded to most of the questions as well so it was really wonderful thank you all for participating you