Okay, good morning. Thank you for coming, progressive to engineer Domain Korser. Hi everyone. Welcome to Europe. I'm really excited to be here for yet another year. Just before I start my talk, I'd like to say a little bit about myself, so you'll better understand the context of it. I've been interested in the software distribution since basically I was a student and I was using Gen2 back at times developing for Google Summer of Code a project to package Python automatically for the Gen2 platform and so on. And in the last three years I've been working on NixOS. It's a Linux distribution, probably heard of it. And I'm tackling the problem of how to distribute all those packages to people and make it easy to use and it turns out it's not. So I'll talk about how Haskell does it and how that compares to Python and what we can learn and what things we already know, but we just can't get there because it's complicated because of our legacy. And currently I'm working for a company called Snap and we're doing open source networking software and I'm infrastructure engineer so I'm setting up the whole pipeline for testing and benchmarking them. So my py, right, we got types in Python so clearly we are improving Python even though it's more than 25 years old and Haskell is definitely inspiration here. So clearly there are things to improve and to learn upon. So let's start how Haskell does packaging. And their tool is called Cabal and you would have a file like this. It's a special kind of syntax. And at the top you'll see just some metadata about the package and at the bottom you'll see you can say, okay, my thing, my software is a library but there is also an executable and it has these dependencies, it lies in the source directory and so on. So one thing that you will figure out is compared to Python, this is just a file that you can parse and in Python we have this script you have to run for actually to do something. I'll dive into that a bit later why that's a big difference and how that affects everyone pretty much. So if you think about the API, in this case in Haskell you would parse this and get the metadata back. In Python the API is setup function which does everything, like literally everything. So the format is more approachable and we'll see that a bit later. So one thing if you were careful enough you notice this build type line in that file and if it's specified as simple that means you parse that file and you have all the information you need to install that package in Haskell. But also you can say build type make or build type custom and in case of make it will run the make files and it will skip the Haskell building process and in case of custom it will run a Haskell program with specific hooks where you can specify code. So you have the power to go from very simple to overriding. Unfortunately the custom method is not used because it's very poorly documented but that's also a good thing because then people fall back to simple. So in Python we have PEP 518 which is I think it's not accepted yet but it talks about basically how to hijack setup tools build process and you can define your build process and this is in progress and you'll be able to go and not even touch the setup tools machinery and do whatever you want. You'll have the freedom to for example write a make file back end for Python packaging and of course this will be integrated into the PEP and so on and all the tools which is really nice because finally we'll be able to go forward from the legacy that we've been stuck. So just a little bit about advanced features in the cabal. For example here in Haskell you can say okay I want to have this flag that you can toggle and for example if we have a flag debug we can describe it, provide a default and then throughout the file we can write conditionals like if this flag is enabled then do this, then this option is configured and so on. So it's like a very simple language with just if sentences and nothing more. And this gives you the flexibility of saying for example if you have a library do we want HTTPS support or not. But there are DAO sites also in Haskell for example at runtime once the package is compiled there is no way to know which flags were used. So you just don't know that. And also for example you can say if HTTPS flag is enabled then add these dependencies but it also works the other way around if for some reason those dependencies are in the environment that flag will be enabled by default. So there is some magic and they also have problems and one thing you learn in packaging is that features are really problematic once you start introducing them you have to support them and these kind of things are really really painful on the long run. And in Python we have the PEP 508 which is environment markers. So for example we have a dependency you can say this dependency is only on Python 3 and Windows for example and so on. This is already supported in PEP but not many people are using this because they don't know about it. And the idea is that you don't write in Python if imperative code is saying if we are on Windows you just say okay this dependency and the marker is Windows and you are done. And this gives everyone else the possibility to also get this information to parse this marker and to do something with that information. And I will talk about later what we are doing with that. So Hackage is the Haskell Python packaging index. You publish your packages there and people can download them. But just as an example of a feature where it's really painful to support on the long run in Hackage you can edit the cabal files in place through the website. So that means if you release version 0.1 for example somebody can go and edit that cabal file and remove a dependency. And then it's not really 0.1 anymore. It's a whole new thing. It's slightly modified but it's still not the same thing. So in that case the Hackage will add this revision to align to cabal file. And when you start to think about okay now I have this local process where I release software and then I can also edit it online. But then what happens if I bump this revision and push it to the Hackage and so on. So there is a lot of stateful things going on suddenly. And while this might be a good idea and maybe some like one percent of people wanted for everyone else using the Hackage to download packages and to figure out the state this is really, really problematic. Especially if you want to have reproducible builds once you edit that file the hash changes of your tabal. So all the people that say okay download this file and this is the hash they will suddenly get a mismatch. And we really don't want to enforce a culture where you just say okay it's a new hash whatever because then there is really no point. So these kind of features are also present in Haskell and they're also present in Python which they give us headaches every day. And the API then for in the Hackage is that you can say revision and 2.cabal and you can get these revisions. But you basically have two versions. First you have a version and then a revision and it just becomes an item handling those. So Haskell is one year older than Python and they've also had this path of improving the packaging ecosystem. And since about until two years ago they had this problem where in your cabal file you had to specify the dependencies and we all know that not all software packages work well together. And in case of Haskell because there are types you would get a new package the types would change and suddenly your usage of that package wouldn't work so Haskell wouldn't compile. And this is the biggest problem they had is called cabal hell. So then you would start when a package would get a new version things wouldn't compile you would start putting in these constraints and so on. So every developer would do this for himself or herself and it's just a big waste of time trying to figure out which packages really compile. So I'll talk about how Haskell solved this but just an interesting thought how Elm which is another functional language solved it. They basically said in your dependencies you have to say always specify the limits of the major version. They say I depend on package HTTP it has to be between version five and six. And then if you uploaded that package an API changed it wouldn't allow you to upload it unless you bump the major version. So it's basically forcing the semantic version of the package. So the package manager forces you not to change the types the signature unless you bump the major version. And that's really nice we cannot do that in Python unfortunately because there's no way to really check if an API changed. Well of course that we could parse the APIs and so on but that's the gray area there. Hopefully something we will be able to do one day. So just how Haskell solved that? So they solved it actually it was released in 2005 so just one year ago called Stack Edge. So Stack Edge is a stable source of Haskell packages we guarantee packages build consistently in past tests before generating nightly and long term support. So what does that mean? So they built a site where as a maintainer can log in you specify some of your information and you say okay I'm a maintainer of these packages on Hackage. And then they go and they pick a dependency tree of your package and build it and see if all the tests and everything passes. And then they say okay we use these versions and these versions compiled. And then they provide an API for that so you can get those versions. So if you think about it in Python we have requirements.gxt but everyone has their own set of versions. In Haskell they pretty much crowdsourced that so they have a website where all those versions are tested and compiled and people use that as a community effort. Not as something you commit to your repository and you hope for the best. And so if you want for example to have backwards compatibility you depend on Stack Edge LTS 6 and then all the minor versions 6.7, 6.8 going to you that the API didn't change but they still ship security updates and so on. And when you're ready usually the new version means a new GAC which is their compiler, the main compiler then you're ready to go and fix those errors, compiler errors and you go to the next version. So I think that's very interesting because they're doing all the work together in one place instead of everyone in their own garden. And I'm not sure really if we could do something like this in Python because it's way more complicated than just compiling the package and saying it works. But I still think it would be worth the effort of at least having the major software that we use in Python to have these versions community managed instead of well having this work done. And by each individual or company. So yeah our solution is requirements.txt. So together with Stack Edge they also released a tool called Stack which is like a wrapper around cabal. So it can do more things than just cabal. And you specify a configuration file like this and you say okay I'm going to use these flags. That you'll pass to cabal when I'll be compiling software. I'm going to use these packages so you say okay the package is in a current directory and there's the cabal file and that's the one we'll use to build this project. And you can have multiple of those. So if you think about how Python does that you have to say pip install minus e dot or something like that. So that's imperative you have to actually like run that and when you have a new if you develop on two packages you have to run for both of them. And in this case it's declarative you open that file. You open that file and you know what packages are being added. There is no imperative steps instead of then saying just stack build and that will execute the whole thing. So it's way more declarative. And at the bottom you see the resolver. This is where you get this big set of pinned version and you say LTS 6.7 and there you go. You have most of the package packages pinned down and you're sure that those work. And there's also a field called extra dependencies and those are the dependencies that are not in the LTS. So not everything is pinned down. It's a community effort so of course if people don't do it then it's not there. So for all the packages you have that you don't that are not part of the LTS you can specify then there. And stack will complain if you don't do that.  It will download a compiler and it will set it up for you based on the resolver that you're using and so on. And stack init will generate the files. It's like a mini-templating for starting Haskell packages and so on. So that's what stack does and the community was really, really happy when this happened. A lot of problems went away. Right. So now that we have this package with all of packages and a stack edge as a set of files, a set of versions, then my job and what I'm doing is how do we distribute all the software to the users so that they can really get these seamlessly and it works for whatever the platform. And we're doing this with Nix. It's a functional language. It's based on a PhD thesis by Elko Bostra. And it's a very short and nice thesis I recommend it to anyone who cares about packaging and how the functional language concept can change the thinking dramatically. It improves a lot of things that we have problem with today. So for Haskell, this is kind of the stack that we have. Nix packages is then a collection of Nix expressions that specify how some software should be built, similar to APT or something else in the distributions, except that we're not tied to a Linux distribution and we support Darwin and Linux. So why you would need this layer on top of the upstream package or PyPI is because we take care of system dependencies. We have a build system that will compile these packages and provide binaries for you. And we have a really powerful API which you'll see later so that you can actually go there and change those packages and, you know, tweak them in a way that you want, apply some patches, boom versions or whatever you want to do. So we're not the upstream that you just have to say, okay, either you use what we have or it's nothing but you have the power of changing that. And most importantly in Nix packages we have all the Haskell packages there. We don't compile all of them. We don't, because that's a lot of, you know, power and disk space that you need. So we take only one G8C version and for that compiler, which is the latest stable one, we compile all the packages or most of them. But theoretically we could distribute all the binaries and so on. So the user can then say, okay, I have this project, I have these packages, I want binaries and it will, you know, the Nix package manager will download that and there you go, you didn't compile anything except your package. And that's really nice, especially because you can share it between Darwin and Linux. Okay, so how does that work in Haskell? How do we get that done and why is it so hard for Python to accomplish this? So this is the simple infrastructure that we have. So let me explain what's really going on here. So in the left upper corner you see Hackats, that's the API that has all the packages. And then there is a script that goes and downloads all of them, calculates the shares and everything and commits that in a repository. So you have a Git repository that's called all cabal hashes and you have all cabal files there. So you can go through all of them and parse them and generate dependency trees and so on, whatever you want to do. And then those hashes, those cabal files are taken and they're built into Stack Edge Nightly and that gives you a view of what builds currently and not and that's a continuous process, of course. And then based on the Stack Edge Nightly, when things kind of look okay, they make this LTS Haskell which you've seen before and that's kind of like, okay, this kind of compiles all together now, let's take those versions. So this is like the Stack Edge and the upstream that Haskell provides. So then we have Hackats.Nix that parses the all cabal hashes repository and the Stack Edge repository and generates Haskell packages.Nix and it generates configuration LTS.Nix. So in Haskell packages.Nix, there is every version of every package specified how you should build it. And this is all generated from the cabal files. It's one-to-one mapping, some features in cabal we don't support, some features we do. There is room for improvement but in general it works. And the configuration LTS basically just says, okay, based on the LTS version and the long list of version dependencies, pick those versions to be the default ones when you use these Haskell packages. So there it's just basically pinning in Nix, okay, take these versions. Because in Hackats packages it will always use the latest version which is, as I've said before, not always means that things will work. All right. So then there are two more files, configuration.-common and configuration.gac.exe. So those are the files that have to be manually, that have to be manually crafted and maintained. And in there, if the cabal file for example doesn't have specified system dependencies, in there we will override and say, okay, for packets HTTP, you know, also take this system dependency and so on. So basically everything that's not in upstream cabal file we will override there. And in configuration.gac we will do that based on the GAC version. So some GAC versions might need different flags or disabled tests because they don't work and so on. So those are the two files that we maintain and everything else is upstream provided by the Haskell community. And then you have this cabal.nix in the middle and this is what the user gets. So when you have your project, you have your cabal file, you say cabal.nix, you run it, and it will generate a Nix expression automatically out of it, specifying all the dependencies. And in there you can say I want a specific LTS version or I want the latest packages or whatever. So this is all, as a user, you just run cabal.nix file and you get basically the whole set of dependencies that you know that they're going to work. And the cabal.nix file has this function called package overrides where you can basically override anything from the upstream. You can say take this package, but different version, take this package, but apply this patch or whatever you want. And then you install this software and then you have binary distributed Haskell pipeline. All right. I hope that was not too fast and it's clear enough. All right. So this is probably the hardest slide, but I would really like to say a few words about the infrastructure in Nix and how these files all work together and it all fits on one slide. It's just not that easy to explain. So basically what we want to do is some kind of inheritance. We have different files and we want those files to override each other.  So at the top you see a function called fix and that's a fix point. That's how you do recursion in functional language. And it's basically calling itself. It's a recursive function that just calls itself. And how it works is it takes the output and it fits it into the input. And because the language is lazy, it will do that only until you reference something. So as for example, in the middle I define something you would call a dictionary. It's called an attribute ZNX, but it's pretty much the same. And you can say, okay, I have an attribute foo that is the value foo and bar with bar. But the foo bar is actually self.foo and self.bar. But that self is really just the input of this function. It's a lambda function. It gets self as a parameter. But that self is actually the output of itself. So it will actually then reference self.foo and self will be the same actual thing and it will reference the foo and get it back. So it's just recursion and a function, nothing really fancy. And when you call fix point on this function, on this dictionary and you ask the foo bar, you will get the value foo bar back. And you'll just basically call it twice. And this is a way how we do dependency and how you can reference different things. Okay, so now that we have that, we want to have a little bit more of flexibility and we define a function called extend. I won't go into how it works, how it's defined. But if you look at the override, that's the function, that's the API you get. And this override function accepts two things. Self and super and self is the input and super is the output of this dictionary. So you have the power to get the previous configuration file and either references inputs or outputs. So you have both things. So in this case, I say, okay, take the foo, take the output super.foo and reverse that. So if I call then fix extend d and the override, so that means extend the d dictionary and override it with this function, you will see that foo bar value is different because we have reversed the foo. And that gives us the power to override the dictionary at the top, either by inputs or outputs. And if you call it twice, oh, it's not seen here, but you will get foo bar back. So that gives you, that gives all the power to override these files. So, okay, how do we use that? This is then all that you need to combine all these files. You say, first I have a fixed point which takes care of the recursion and then I take all the Haskell packages, the common configuration file you've seen before, the compiler specific config, the packet set config, and then at the bottom all of the overrides where you can hook into. And you can change everything from the upstream how it's built. So in Python currently nicks, we manually edit files. Why? Because of this problem, we have a set of high scripts and you have to run all of those scripts to actually get and figure out what's going on. So someone would need to take that and for everything in Python Packaging Index generates JSON file or something with all this media information that we could then use to generate an automata of this. And we would need to maintain the requirements file global for the whole Python Packaging Index. So these are the two big, big projects that one would need to tackle in order to have the same infrastructure. And then we would be able to build all the, the whole Python Packaging Index basically and distribute it to people. And well, the first one, the first problem is kind of being solved and communities is trying to get there but we still don't have a way to do it today. But the infrastructure is improving. We got wheels, we're getting a new Python Packaging Index called warehouse, which is going to be tested and easily changeable and so on. So everything around is changing but this is still not doable today. And with the build system hook that I talked before we'll be able to have different tools than just setup tools to build Python packages and hopefully one day we'll have a standard one that will be statically based instead of a script that you have to run. And as for the second problem, I don't know currently if anyone is solving that or crowd sourcing the versions but it's definitely something that we'll have to solve it ourselves or someone will have to do it for us. So, so Python is actually doing quite good in the sense that it has all of these things are being worked on and so on. But one thing that's really missing is if you think about it, that it's still not declarative enough. We have so many files that you have to touch. You have to touch the setup py, setup.jpg requirements manifest. Now the py project terminal is coming, talks.ini and it's just a lot of different things you have to set and in Haskell there's just two files, the cabal and the stack. And it's really hard to get rid of these because this is our legacy but it's a lot of information people have to know to actually to use it. And this is improving but it's still an ongoing process. All right. So this talk was based on the Peter Siemens inside our next packages Haskell infrastructure. If you want to see that talk, it goes a little bit into the details, how it all works. And I hope that you've seen what are the current implementations and at the same time I would still like to thank the Python Package during Authority and everyone who's working on improving the ecosystem. It's really hard to have 25 years of legacy and just replace all of this and say, okay, we have this new shiny thing, it's gonna work out. And it's going slow but there's progress. So thank you. So we have time for questions, right? Thank you very much, Daman. Someone wants to ask a question now? Any questions? Okay, thank you for coming.


Hello everyone and a very warm welcome to this session where we are talking about the subject that I think concerns everybody in terms of our quality and ensuring everyone has access to financial services. So this session on comparing notes on financial inclusion will draw from the experiences from around the world. We are going to go to Asia. We are going to go to Africa and we are going to go to Europe, but Europe meshed with emerging economies. I thank you all for coming and joining us. Let me begin first with the definition of financial inclusion as developed by the World Economic Forum. The forum defines financial inclusion as access to and use of quality affordable financial products and services that lead to greater financial well-being. One of my panelists wants to move beyond just enabling financial inclusion. We are going to be talking about financial health as well. So I am really looking forward to this session. I did a bit of reading and I thought what I would do is begin first of all by perhaps closing a little quiz, which is the most financially inclusive country in the world. Is there anyone who would have an idea which such country is? Singapore. Singapore. She comes of course from the region. Indeed it is Singapore. When I went through that number it was very interesting for me to also see African countries not doing too badly on that measure. There were 42 countries that were measured last year. This report came out last year. And I saw Ghana as well as Nigeria ahead of Argentina in terms of financial inclusion. So work is being done to improve financial inclusion. But it's not enough. There is a lot more that needs to be done. I'd like to introduce my panelists for this session. Please help me to welcome Her Majesty, Queen Maximum of the Netherlands. She is the United Nations Secretary General Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development. Your Majesty, welcome. Let me also welcome Siree Chia. She is the Governor of the National Bank of Cambodia. Ma'am, welcome. With us also in this session is Munir Anakla. He is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of MNT, Halan, Egypt. And last but not least, let me welcome a fellow African, Ian Williamson, his Chief Executive Officer at Old Mutual. Thank you all for coming. Your Majesty, I'm going to start with you. And I really wanted your thoughts, just opening thoughts on financial inclusion. And perhaps you can include in it the work that you have done since you were appointed. Good. So well, I was appointed by the Secretary General in 2009. So this year, I'm still a teenager of 15 years of appointment. And in these last 15 years, we've actually seen the need to be moved in terms of financial inclusion. We're talking the first index, which is something I helped promote and happen. We were something around 50 percent globally. And now we know we actually are sticking to the people doing the data. And this year, we're going to do another service going to be presented next year. And we're going to be the north of 80 percent. So this is a 50 percent increase. So we took about a very successful, I would say, project in trying to get this thing going. And how do we actually attain this? Well, first of all, there have been about 60-plus countries that have actually had financial inclusion, national strategies. And this has been an effort of actually different ministries. Not only the Ministry of Finance, but also the Ministry of Social Affairs, because it's a government to people payments that need to be done. The Ministry of Agriculture, because there are also agricultural policies that need to be considered. There are issues like, for example, sometimes education, there are sort of education stipends that actually need to be considered. So the Ministry of Interior, because you need to have an ID to open an account. So this notion of actually getting sort of a coordination among ministries, I've actually really advanced the issues. Why? Because in order to open an account, you need to have an ID. And I have to say that when I started this job, there were actually very little countries in Africa or Latin America that had one ubiquitous type of ID. And certainly that it was digital. And certainly that it was biometric. And we've really worked with all our partners to actually help that being, I mean, to grow this. And the interesting part of it is that, yes, it is very necessary for financial services, but not only. It's also good for school enrollment. It's also good for health, who actually got a vaccination or not. It's very good to actually to get your subsidies from the government. So this has not only effect to the financial services, it's a very important issue. The digitalization has played, of course, a very important role. And I think we have here on my right a very good example of how it actually has been driven in Egypt. But it has basically brought the first two things, increased affordability by reducing the costs. And also the easiness. Now you have your bank branch basically in the palm of your hands. So this has actually really changed the access, but also has changed the usage. You know, you can actually sort of have access to a lot more types of products that could actually have done before. So this notion now of going from, we're going access to usage. We've been actually talking about the access side for some time. Then we actually went to usage. And now we're going to the next frontier, which is the financial health. What are the outcomes? I would really, you know, once we put the rails there, we got to the people, I would really get given them the right products and services that are actually going to help people have better financial lives. And I love this issue of having definitions. So I'm going to give you the definition of financial health because I find it's a very important issue. Sure. It's one, is managing the concept of managing day to day finances. So poor people actually have very complicated financial lives because they do not get sort of income once a month and the electricity bill once a month and this bill once a month. It's actually sort of, you know, quite chaotic. So they have to sort of, you know, surf around, you know, during the week to actually sort of get that money and getting themselves into very expensive sort of credit tools to actually make ends meet. Number two, invest in long term goals, education of your children, adding another room to your house, maybe by a tractor to improve your yields in the future agriculture. For that you need better long term credit mechanisms and savings. Number three is risks. If we think we have risks, when you're poor in countries in Latin America or in Africa, you have much more risk. So we do so much work in trying to get people out of poverty and financial inclusion has actually helped people to get out of poverty, but then something happens and then we fall back into poverty again. So this issue of resilience is something extremely important and that is, again, savings, having emergency savings, buffers and insurance. And the fourth one is actually are you confident enough in managing your financial life? And are we giving them enough tools, budgeting, insights, you know, I think that, you know, in that sense, digitization will actually offer AI, will actually offer, you know, fantastic opportunity in actually giving people sort of, you know, the right advice to lower the costs, maybe increase their income, and actually sort of match all the financial lives to actually sort of being able to save better. So I think this is sort of since set up on what is financial, where is financial inclusion going? Absolutely. And what I think that, you know, our focus should be actually lying on. Absolutely. I've got a personal question there for you. I mean, you speak with a lot of passion and this question might bite me, but I'm thinking you are a queen and you are immersing yourself in a subject that many would say is better left to bureaucrats. You would imagine the things that you could do in your time, but you have decided to devote yourself to financial inclusion. I'm a bureaucrat. Why? Well, people do know what you do, so can I work for the government? So I think as a child, I was born and raised in Argentina and I saw what, you know, inequality and lack of opportunities and high inflation context would do to actually lower millions of people. And it's been always my passion to try to sort of turn that around. I was an economist and a banker, so this is what I can do. Absolutely. So if I would be a teacher, I probably would be an education. So I decided that this, and I think that, you know, financial inclusion is an amazing tool, an enabler, you know, it touches upon seven of the 17 SDGs. So if we take this seriously, we can really build up so many things on top of it. So this, I think it's a very nice crusade to be involved. Absolutely. And we welcome your energy. No question about it. For those who are joining us online, please use the hashtag, Wef24, Governor, can I come to you? Perhaps you're opening thoughts on financial inclusion, and of course, if you can mesh that into the word that you are doing in Colombia. So sorry. Cambodia. Cambodia. Almost. Well, thank you. And I listened with a lot of interest what Your Majesty was talking about. The definitions of financial health. I'm going to try to give a definition. I hope that it would enclose whatever you mentioned, financial inclusion and financial health. So my definition is financial inclusion is access to and usage of affordable, formal financial services in a timely manner to your point day to day based on their needs with legal protection, something that you didn't mention about the legal protections. So this is what definition we give to ourself in Cambodia when we were preparing our national financial inclusion strategies to your point. This is not something that central bank can do alone or any single authority can do alone. We need coordination. And this is why a national policy is very important. It's get everyone involved into this process. And so in this national policy, there are six focuses, six priorities. One is the encourage saving informal financial institutions, which sounds sort of common sense, but not so common in our countries where putting money under the mattress is more common than putting money in a financial institution. Two is to promote innovative credit products for SME. So it has to be something that is suitable for them to use, enable the expansion of payment system capability, because if you want to bring people to save in a formal financial system, you have to have a mean that allow them to use that money, because if you expect them to travel all the way to a bank branch and withdraw money, then it beat all the purpose and nobody is going to save in a financial institution. So you need a system that allow them to make payments straight from their bank account wherever they are, whenever it is. The three is to, four is to improve broader access to insurance. Again, to your point about financial health. In Cambodia at the moment, there's only 12% of the population having a health insurance versus to 70% having access to financial, one form of formal financial services. So this is something that we want to make sure and therefore build that resilience. Five is to strengthen the capacity of financial sector regulators. It's also important because regulators need to strengthen themselves and make sure that these financial institutions are doing a good job that they're stable. And six is consumer, increased consumer empowerment protections and financial sector transparency. Again, this is for the sake of financial stability because as regulator promoting access and usage is one thing. It's more of a developmental side of central banking. But we have to also look at the broader picture, which is monetary stability, financial stability and therefore making the financial system more transparent is something that is at the core of our work. Yeah, so at 12% you still have a lot of work to do. Do you find the political support that you require or perhaps is that something that could be perhaps increased and help you to do more? I think the national policy in itself is a strong political manifestation that they support this initiative because it's not just central bank as I mentioned, everyone now will have a role to play in making this strategy happen. But I think what is lacking is education and awareness. A lot of people don't understand. People don't want to buy insurance because they don't see why they have to pay money up front. What they don't understand is that when something happens, it's going to be bad. And we're talking here about people who are not educated at all. But as a bank regulator, I can make this allusion to when we were facing the global financial crisis and Basel III was introduced. And that means having the financial institution to increase their capital base, et cetera, nobody wanted to do because they think it's a waste of resources. But in fact, this is a form of insurance. So if this big financing is not one to do that, how can you imagine and explain these poor people to go and pay up front insurance policies? Absolutely, I can tell you that education from a personal experience is a vital, vital tool. I come from the rural areas and I remember way back in the years when I started working suddenly, I had money in my pocket that I'd never seen in my life before. That experience was terrible. I saw that experience replicated. I come from Zimbabwe. I saw that experience replicated in South Africa upon the dawn of democracy. So let's go to South Africa. Ian, will you share your definition? I don't know if you're going to corroborate my story in terms of importance of education, but the floor is yours. Thank you. I'm not going to build on the governor's definition. It's more or less exactly the same as the one I would have used. I would have rather than saying with legal protection, I would have just said a regulated product, but it's essentially the same thing. In a South African context, I think we've largely cracked the access problem. Distribution networks, up-broad digital technology has allowed us to circumvent many of the historical access problems. We used to have a big problem where people from the rural areas, for example, would get to retirement. The pension fund money would become available and then the problem of having to go every month to a payout point to pick up your monthly income was too costly. So we actually ended up circumventing that by having lump sum payments at retirement, which is also not a good answer. So I think that that world for me has moved on, and I've started to think more about what I've called financial empowerment, which is a very similar thing to the financial health concept. And I think we're at the frontier where it's actually mostly about the educational piece, to your point, and that turns into a reduction in the information, a symmetry between the provider and the consumer. And then that turns into appropriate research of the products that are made available, because what tends to happen if there's good access without appropriate informed demand you've cracked the supply side of the problem, but the demand side of the problem is still deficient, is that you get inappropriate credit extension. You get abusive interest rates being charged. You get payday lending happening. You get insurance being over provided. And I think that for me is where the problem landscape is currently sitting. It's mostly around the usage, the appropriate usage. And therefore, I think the root cause solution to that is the educational piece. So what we do is we conduct what we call a savings and investment monitor once a year into the South African household population, which essentially monitors both where the psychology of households is on an annual basis and how they're feeling about their finances. Do I feel like I'm in control? Do I feel out of control? Do I feel that better than last year about where my family is at from a financial perspective? And we also then, as part of that survey, we monitor things like, well, what products have been used? How have they been used? Why have they been used? And one of the issues we have in South Africa is that there's a very high usage of informal savings products. So Godfrey will know about the concept of a stock fold. It's basically a savings club. And people informally get together.  But it's open to abuse by the more informed members of the club versus the less informed members of the club. And so those kind of things create another problem. But I think I'm very firmly on your page, probably because we come from a similar background, that the financial education is key. Absolutely. And regulation becomes key, isn't it? Yes. Do we see enough in terms of regulation to protect those people who are so vulnerable? I mean, we're talking large population sizes here. We're talking millions of people. I think it obviously varies by country. But largely, I think financial service regulation is at least at a principal level. It was quite well-homonised. The details are horribly different. And that causes other problems. But at least at a principal level, I think it's quite well-homonised. And there is quite a lot of protection. The problem, one of the problems we have in South Africa on that note is that awareness by consumers of the availability of things like an ombudsman. There exists a framework. The regulations were well-intended. People just don't know about it. So they don't take advantage of the mechanisms that are available to them to protect themselves. And that is a problem. And we know the capacity of the state in many of the countries where we come from is inadequate. And therefore, the ability to be able to monitor and protect is limited. Let me come to you, Munia. You saw an opportunity in financial inclusion. You need to tell us how to your story. Sure. So the story starts maybe 25 years ago. I was doing an undergrad dissertation on the impact of microfinance. Later on, I moved into a full-fledged study on the impact of microfinance. And I thought it's revolutionary. I thought it's really benefiting people's lives. And people really needed this finance into their businesses to grow their businesses, employ people, address new markets. Later on, in 2010, I got the opportunity to establish a vehicle financing business. And it was a tuk-tuk business on credit. And these were revenue-generating businesses. And during the course of the following few years, we generated hundreds of thousands of jobs. Because the return on equity of a tuk-tuk is maybe 100%. You can collect your money in 10 months or in 12 months. But most of the owners didn't have the money, the startup capital, to buy the actual rickshaw. So we provided this. And it was a very creative way because there was no microfinance law that enabled private companies to do so. Later in 2014, I established a microfinance company when the law was issued. And we started focusing on women. And it was quite innovative. We focused on group loans for women. And probably we were the largest doing so. In 2017, we founded Highland, M&T Highland, which is the company we have now. And it was basically to revolutionize access to financial services through technology. And together with my co-founder, Ahmad Mohsen, we started trying to create creative loans and creative financial solutions in general to this segment to help them. To date, we've provided financing maybe north of $3 billion. We've provided access to more than 3 and 1 half, 4 million people in Egypt. And if you think of that the unique credit card holders in Egypt are 2 and 1 half, 3 million across all banks, just gives you a bit of idea where we are. We ventured into payments. So we have a mobile wallet that has hundreds of millions of dollars throughput monthly. We launched our cards very recently. And that will be a game, game changer, the cards. Because it will connect the customer to the application on a regular basis. And we will be able, we currently have a lot of algorithms analyzing a lot of traditional data and non-traditional data, like mobile usage, social media, what they're doing, in order to create personalized advice, whether it's in budgeting, whether it's in different products that if we see him buying a product that's going to have a discount in three weeks, we'd give him an advice. This is still not live, but this is work in progress and it's happening. I'd like to also comment on a few things that were mentioned, insurance. Insurance is something we've tried very, very hard with. And customers don't want to pay for insurance. And the only solution is that they don't want to. They'll tell you, you're giving me money from one hand and you want to take it from the other hand. What's this? And what we eventually did is we embedded the bundling. This product includes insurance and it's for your own good. And even if very often we carry the cost and it's still overall good. So this is what we're doing. We're very, very excited to be here. And we're looking forward to take this business outside of Egypt and to other regions. Sure. And we're looking forward to you doing so. And I think you are being modest. You're not mentioning that you are the fastest growing provider of these products to the Egyptian population and you're also the largest. How has been your experience with regulators as you were expanding so rapidly? So regulators have been mostly supportive. Every regulation that came up helped us enormously. We most recently are in the sandbox of the central bank of Egypt for rotating savings and credit schemes. And this is, we're going to do this digitally over a mobile phone. So 10 people, each one puts 1,000 pounds. One person takes 10,000 pounds the first month. 10,000 pounds the last month. And it's a form of savings. It's a form of insurance. And it's a form of credit. But when it's not done in a formal manner, then it's not equitable. It's not fair because the last one is actually a saver and the first one is a borrower. And the only way they make it equitable is then they do another round and then the last one becomes the first and the first becomes the last. But obviously the market doesn't always work in so efficiently. But when we are organizing this, we ensure efficiency and equitability. Your Majesty, I want you to weigh in on some of the issues that you raised, especially around insurance. But I also wanted you to talk to your pet because before we know it, time will have gone. We've got to talk about how you ensure financial health and whose responsibility that should be. I think it's a very good question. And I will like to, I wouldn't say disagree, but put the focus in a different way. First of all, financial education, very important. I think that should be embedded in school curricula. Children should know the basics of budgeting. They should know what is credit, more or less what is an insurance. But one thing, financial inclusion does not work. Education, sorry, does not work. If you don't have the product, you can actually practice it immediately. So we've actually learned that in the Netherlands. We've actually done very good research on this. When do you begin, though? At what level? You have to begin, like I gave my kids pocket money. At home.  Well, now you will learn how to hit very better. If I go and save her, she will never gonna learn. So I would like to say that financial education is definitely important, but it will not ensure your demand. Agreed. And it will surely not change behavior. So if we look at insurance and basically, today I was actually having a conversation, insurance is the most boring thing ever. I'm so sorry. I'm an insurer, by the way. But it doesn't get anybody excited. It's the most unsexy thing in the planet. First of all, you never want to think about anything negative happening to you in the future. You wanna think the rosy-posey future you're gonna have. So why should I, you know, maybe start thinking I'm paying today for something that might or not happen to me in the future. Death, oh my God, God forbid. You know, so, you know, the only, even in developed economies, only the penetration of insurance is only 15%. Sure. And these are very highly educated people, even in Singapore. So we have to sort of realize that the notions of how do we get these, our people resilience will not be by educating and telling the good things about insurance. It will never work. So it's about bundling. You take a credit, you'll have an insurance that this person would actually be able, if something happens, she will be able to, you know, I had a visit in Morocco, by the way. And this lady had a baker in her house and something happened with a gas leakage and her apartment went into flames. But she had a insurance and a credit. So she could rebuild her apartment in one month. She was back in the bakery again. So it was all embedded in a credit product. Or you could actually embed it in, you know, if you're selling a very good seed, which is actually drought resistant. And that person yielding much better, serve, you know, use for the crops.  And therefore be able to buy that seed again. So the supply of the seed gets actually, you know, he's selling of a seed every year. So it's bundling, or you make a compulsory. Issues like pensions, the 401k is a compulsory thing. In the Netherlands, you know, apart from self-employed, is a compulsory thing. People do not think about the future, sort of when they get a retirement. And so we need to get a compulsory, or we need to bundle it. So we need to start thinking on the financial health side, not so much on the demand, because, you know, I want to have that big TV flat screen tomorrow, you know. I don't want to be saying so. The issue is, how do we define and design products? And the reality is there's been so little innovation in the last 10 to 15 years on savings, for example. So frankly, we just give sort of, you know, this is a savings account. It doesn't pay enough money. They do not sort of, you know, very little sort of, you know, there's a couple of things that's actually done, some very interesting things have actually served, for example, same for peculiar of commitment things, or round up your purchases. There has been some kind of innovation, but clearly has not been done in volume, and there's a huge amount of potential in looking into this whole saving things, also innovating in the whole insurance market. So I disagree that financial education will actually create the demand. I think the supply side has a big responsibility, and I think we have to make a lot better design. I think you did too. And I realize that, you know, the savings side is very much regulated, so there's little space sometimes to do that, but that's why the public-private collaboration here is essential. Absolutely. So I think I should clarify what I meant. We do a few things in the financial education space. One is we do provide some school curriculum stuff, and I agree that's not very impactful because there's too much of a gap between the lesser learned and the practical application. But the biggest thing that we do practically on the ground is we do work site education, and we actually provide those financial solutions at the same time as providing the education. That does work. I think I can evidence the six million customers that it works, and I'm an insurer. And even though we are the biggest insurer in the country. I'm sorry for my time. But I do think that- I know that you agree with that. It's a hard sell. So I'm giving you some context. It is a hard sell. I'll just give you a few counter examples. One of the other things that we found to be quite effective, for example, in the savings space, we have a transactional bank account, or it's a transactional account. I shouldn't call it a bank account because it's not a regulated bank. But that card has a few features. One of them is that every time you spend money, you can designate a percentage of that money to go into your savings pocket. So it's the embedded concept for savings. And what we've done is because we provide mutual funds as one of the solutions that we offer, we put that savings pocket money into a mutual fund. So you're getting an institutional money market rate of return on your savings and not a bank deposit rate of return on your savings. So that's quite a nice innovation that's very popular with our customers. So I do agree totally that there's a whole bunch of stuff around product innovation, which really turns into how do I give better value for money or a better return to someone who's looking to save? And you can only do that in two ways. One is either giving away more of the investment return that's earned on the underlying assets or you're cutting the costs. You can cut the costs by digital, solving your distribution problems or et cetera. But I do still fundamentally believe that even with a well-intended embedded solution, if consumers aren't informed about what they're actually buying, there's a real danger of them being the subject of serious abuse. And regulation doesn't necessarily solve that problem. I need Mounia to come in very quickly because the governor needs to weigh in as well on the issue of insurance. And we need to talk about the role of technology everywhere around us. We are abuzz with the issue of AI and the role that it could potentially do in our economy. So Mounia, quickly, and then we come to the governor. Very quickly on savings. We live in a lot of countries where there's very, very fast inflation. So double-digit inflation. Egypt last year was north of 30% inflation. So a lot of these people who are saving in traditional manners, they find that their savings are being depleted. So we came up with a creative solution a few months ago which is to save slash invest in gold. And this can be digital and it's inflation protected because it's already denominated, obviously. And we're seeing huge pickup. Couple this with technology, then the distribution becomes exponential because you can distribute it exponentially through an application. Thank you. Thank you, Mounia. Government? I don't know whether it's polite to disagree with a queen. You can do so polite. I'm going to say financial education, financial literacy, it's not the only way to promote access, but it is essential. And I think contacts matter. And the reason I say that is because in Cambodia, for instance, building the trust and confidence is very important. This is a country where we've gone through 30 years of civil war. This is the only country in modern history where monetary system or money was completely abolished in the country from 1975 to 1979. And the entire country was reduced to a barter system. Nowhere else you'll see that, not even in North Korea. And so overnight, people were losing their savings in the bank accounts. Now, how to bring back this confidence and trust to very traumatized people, how to encourage them to go and save money in financial institutions. Now, the next generation will also hear from their parents about, remember, I lose my money in a bank overnight. I don't want you to save in the financial system or a bank. Why don't you buy gold to save? Why don't you buy land? Why don't you do something else? So this is something that is very important to educate from a very young about the importance of saving, the importance of credit, the importance of certain things that is important for them. The other thing is also important, I believe, particularly girls, because girls are the most likely to drop out of school. And without some basic understanding about financial matters, I think once they leave school, they'll be done, they'll be doomed. And it will be very difficult for them to be alive and will be solely relying on the husband. That's not something that we want to happen. So I think this is very important. And also to your questions about technology, there's something that I worked on that is very important, I think, to promote access. One is the credit bureau. And we've never talked enough about credit bureau. We've established credit bureau about 10 years ago and we actually learned the model from Egypt. I went to Egypt to look at how it was built. And I think it's important to have a professionally run credit bureau that include both negative and positive information. Not just negative, because then it feels like it's a punishment. But we also include the positive then become an incentive because if you repay on time, then this is an incentive for banks to look at you in a different angle and maybe give you a cheaper loan. The credit bureau is very important to help access, but also important for central banks and for regulators to better manage the whole entire system in a very transparent manner. The other thing also about this credit bureau, it has to be comprehensive. So microfinance and bank needs to be in the same system because then you would easily allow this person to graduate from microfinance to bank easily because if you have two different credit bureau which happen in a lot of country, once you exit the microfinance, you go to the bank, and then you have to rebuild the entire history about yourself again in the bank bureau. So to have this comprehensive credit bureau is very important. And the second thing I think it's important is the digital infrastructure. I mentioned earlier about how can you encourage people to go and save if for them then to need the money they have to ride a motorcycle, to withdraw money from the ATM or bank branch. You have to make it easy and accessible and to provide an infrastructure of interoperability among the different players in the country is very important. We've done that with our Bakong system which is a blockchain based technology where we bring everyone, all the bank, all the customers of the banks in the country to talk to each other. They can send money across from different banks but not only in the country but also across the border. So people with bank account in Cambodia can go to our neighboring countries or partnering countries to make payment there. And that's encouraged them to save because then if they open an account they can go and they can transact easier. To have a credit card is very difficult in our country because you have to provide a lot of things. And SPACs basically master visa card in Cambodia work as more like a debit card. You have to deposit money for the bank to issue. So having a bank account and to be able to just go across the border and make payment is helpful. The other thing is also for tourists to come into our country, the partnering countries that come to Cambodia, they can also make payment from their bank account. That's implies that the seller, the small shop owners have to open a bank account and put up their QR code in order to get more customers, particularly tourists, to come and buy. And that's again, forced them to go and open a bank account. Wow, sure, sure. So to your point about the cultural considerations, experience also matters. Of course, I give the example here of Zimbabwe. When a hyperinflation hit the country, nobody wanted their money in a bank account because they found, even those who were holding US dollar fund overnight, your money had become ZIM dollars, ZIM dollars which had become worthless. So very important to consider that. We need to ask you the question around technology and whether it could be perhaps the panacea to all of this. We've got four minutes and I just wanted to get a couple of points from around the room, very quickly if you can. Yes, I think technology is changing the world in general. It will be able to provide very, very targeted, personalized financial advice to individuals to manage their financial life. Moreover, when a creative product is designed, it's very easy to disseminate and the onboarding becomes easier. I think one critical thing for that is to have digital KYC, which does not exist in all countries, but it is a game changer. And e-signatures that are accepted by courts because an e-signature where a court doesn't operate on, it's practically useless. Moreover, I think the development and design teams, the technology development and design teams, the productivity is growing 5x, 10x because of large language models. So, and very soon we'll be able to provide 24x7 customer support service without humans. Just technology. I would like to say something, and I think that a lot of people have been a little bit mentioning it, but apart from the foreign financial education, I think that don't get me wrong, I'm the president of the financial education system in the Netherlands, so I am competing for it, but it will not show you demand. And I think it's more sort of, you see that if you design the products properly, then you see it. And it would not assure your financial health either. So I think that's a distinction I would like to make. We've been working the last 10 years on a notion that we call digital public infrastructure. So. And it, you know, on our experiences of different countries to actually have this sort of stack of things that are actually very important. One of things, the IDs, e-signature, digital ID, so that's extremely important. Even having a QR code legislation is very important. Having credit bureaus is also something very important. Credit bureaus are probably will be, I would say not replaced, but in some way enhanced by open finance regulations that actually now we have in very good examples in Brazil, India, Singapore. I know, well, you have open banking in the European Union, but that's something that is actually will be turning basically the empowerment of the data from the financial service provider to the consumer. And that's, I think, has how it's great promise. Everything that has to do with consumer protection, you know, recourse mechanisms, because also that has to be also some kind of protection.  And suddenly nothing, nobody has actually mentioned cybersecurity and fraud prevention, because the more digitization we have, we have also other risks coming in. And that's, you know, the fraud and cybersecurity issues are actually very, very important. Your Majesty, I wish I had your powers because they're not just to clear that this session is going to continue for another 20 minutes. Unfortunately, the world economy forum won't allow me to. But is there anyone with a burning point that they would like to make? There's a lady there and there's a lady there. You are looking at the same clock that I'm looking at. My name's Roshane and I run one of the largest microfinance programs in Pakistan for women.  But actually, Findex is showing that gender divide is increasing as far as access to finance is concerned. So my question to the queen is, and we worked together earlier as well, what are the three things we need to do? What have we not done enough to actually push the needle for women? Thank you very much. Let's quickly take the point from the lady here in front. Yes, Amal, I'm from Egypt and I've witnessed and been a beneficiary of M&T Highland's success. So I'm personally very proud of the financial inclusion we've witnessed in Egypt so far and I hope to see it scaled to the rest of the region, if not the whole global south. But I wanted to ask about AI and how you see that increasing, you know, the ability to bundle more products, to get more creative and to the governor's point on credit and how to have all the data in one place to create more products. And hopefully, I think Egypt with M&T Highland and unicorns like that will be more financially inclusive than Singapore. Thank you. Your Majesty, you want to answer? Roshane, nice to see you. I knew that you were running around here. Actually, the Findex numbers were pretty OK on the gender gap. So we went from 9% to 6% and globally 4%. So we've been doing a lot of work and what the work that she's doing is extraordinary, by the way. So talking about sort of in education, tuning that with, you know, financial services and not only financial services, also tuning out with a lot of other extension services, specifically for women. But issues like in certain countries, I know that in Pakistan, we have not moved the needle on the financial access for women. Nigeria, 20% gender gap. We just spoke to the vice president about this issue. But in some of the countries, we've done actually very good work. And one of the things we've actually seen really helps is, first of all, connectivity of women. Women have less smartphones than men, use much less access to internet connectivity than men. So this issue of getting women connected is very important. Then we rely on agents for the mobile money. And a lot of these agents are men. So women do not want to go to the neighborhoods, to the men and go and deposit, because then the husband wouldn't actually know that she has so much money. Know what you're, we're all laughing, but you know, privacy for women is extremely important. Privacy and security. So, sorry, I mean, it is a very important factor. And having women agents has been a game changer in a lot of economies. And then the adequacy of the products, looking at the female needs, which actually are different than some of the men need. So these three things have been a game changer. So I hope that we continue to do that work. And I continue sort of, you know, supporting. And I hope that, you know, there's a drop-up payment system. The rest in Pakistan will actually sort of, you know, help spur that innovation and competition in your country. And they can actually sort of get more women inserted. Yeah, my just to thank you very much. And I'd like to thank everyone who has been in this room and those who have been listening online. The conversation must continue. And there's certainly no end to this one. I took our way out of this session. Policies need to change. And we need to recognize the gender gap. We have to strengthen regulation. Education is absolutely key. If your business appears to be safe. Thank you for listening. Please help me to thank Her Majesty. Thank you. Thank you for your participation. Thank you.