For those of you who are wishing to post comments during the forum, we have set up a twitter feed at financialinclusion. So youre welcome to make any comments that you would like. So there are nearly two billion adults globally who do not have Bank Accounts. This makes it very difficult to Access Financial services, pay bills or transfer money to relatives. In addition, it is hard in those circumstances to be an entrepreneur when you are outside the formal Financial System. Its difficult to gain access to capital or form a business when you lack basic Financial Services. But the good news is that many nations have made commitments to expanding Financial Services for the poor. They understand the Financial Inclusion is vital to Economic Development and social inclusion. As a result they are developing Financial Inclusion policies and implementing a new frame works that encourage inclusion. So today robin lewis, john, and myself are launching our third annual brookings scorecard measuring progress on Financial Access and usage with the support of the bill in me lin d Melinda Gates foundation. The short summary is that weve seen progress on financial servi services in many places. There are efforts to help marginalized populations and this is happening through mobile money and digital Financial Services. Weve got detailed suggestions from every country. Weve also talked with many leaders in the Ngo Community who are active on Financial Inclusion and were grateful for their support and their help along the way. To give you a more detailed sense of the highlights of our study, my colleague robin lewis will summarize the key findings. Robin is a Research Analyst at brookings. With that, i will turn it over to robin. Good morning. Thank you to darrell for those remarks. And our sincere thanks to all of you for joining us this morning. Either here at brookings or vi alive stream. We are very grateful for your interest in the project and im looking forward to providing a brief overview of our approach and key findings before we turn it over to the panel discussion. So first id like to start with a brief overview of our project. As darrell mentioned, the financial and Digital Inclusion project or fdip was launched in the summer of 2014. The purpose of the project is to provide policymakers, private sector representatives and the general public with information that can help improve Financial Inclusion in the fdip focus countries. Why does Financial Inclusion matter . At the individual level Financial Inclusion matters because it provides pathways for people to improve their Financial Health which contributes to their overall wellbeing. Beyond that, it is a key ingredient in advancing Sustainable Development goals such as Poverty Reduction and gender equality. Soto support our overall objective, over the past three years we have selected a series of politically economically and geographically diverse countries and we have evaluated their progress toward Financial Inclusion through a series of annual reports as well as conversations with diverse groups of experts. So lets talk briefly about the reports that we are launching today. This is the third annual fdip report and as with the first two reports we examined access and usage of formal Financial Services across diverse country contacts. So when i say formal Financial Services, we primarily focused on basic Services Since these are often the entry point to the formal Financial System. Including savings accounts and government to person transfers. For the 2017 report, we have distilled and updated the Country Profiles that we featured in 2015 and 2016. And in addition to these selected Financial Inclusion highlights and recent updates we have included some recommendations regarding key next steps for advancing Financial Inclusion. Given the scope of our sample and the rapidly evolving nature of the Financial Inclusion vi m environment around the world, these lists are not exhaustive but we do believe they capture an important snapshot of Key Developments for future growth. So moving to a quick scorecard interview, as darrell mentioned, one of the components of our report informed by our research on each countrys landscape is a scorecard tool. To develop this scorecard, we included country commitment, mobile capacity, regular la tore environment, and the adoption of formal Financial Services. So in terms of our countrys sample, we maintain the same list as in the Previous Year in which we added five new countries to diversify our sample. These countries included the Dominican Republic, egypt, el salvador, haiti and vet maam. We will dive into the dimension level findings, but for the most here is our preview of the scorecard. As you can see, the top scoring countries are generally distributed across latin america and africa. Although countries in other regions including the philippines also demonstrated strong performances as l. Fwell. For the third year in a row kenya received the top place on our scorecard. With that said, a number of other top scoring countries including several in latin america have experienced lower levels of mobile Money Adoption to date but often have robust take up of innovative card based services as well as nontraditional Access Points such as banking correspondence. We think that this finding should be very encouraging to the Financial Inclusion community. Because it demonstrates that countries with different Political Economic and geographic environments can effectively pursue different pathways for advancing Financial Inclusion. Soto provide a better sense of what factors inform these scores, well briefly with through some of the indicators across the four dimensions before we explore our findings. For example, country commitment indicators include the existence of comprehensive national Financial Inclusion strategies as well as specific Financial Inclusion protection frameworks. Excuse me, Consumer Protection frameworks. These indicators help give us a sense of whether countries are willing to work collaboratively across sectors to make engagement to engagement with formal Financial Services a priority. Moving to mobile capacity, we measured this because it includes indicators related to mobile infrastructure as well as the number and type of mobile Money Services that are offered. While digital Financial Inclusion services extend far beyond mobile money, these offerings can provide a very convenient affordable platform for those who are typical underserved to Access Financial services. Moving briefly to Regulatory Environments, we look at whether regulations, policies, or other guidance concerning electronic money and other forms of digital Financial Services have been issued. We also look at issues such as mobile money platform intra operability. Which basically means whether customers of one service can send payments of another mobile money service. Finally, moving to the adoption indicators, we focused on account adoption with both more Traditional Financial Service Providers as well as mobile money providers across underserved groups in particular. These groups may include lower income adults as well as women. All the data in this set is from the world banks global index database and we look forward to updating the data as the new data set is released. Moving to the key findings. So first lets begin with the country commitment dimension and touch on a few examples of countries progress. For example, mexico increased its overall score by 5 Percentage Points to join the top five countries. A couple changes released the national Financial Inclusion plan. The government of mexico also joined the United Nations based better than cash alliance. Moving to mobile capacity, el salvador is an example of a country that boosted its score by 5 Percentage Points over the past year by of smartphones which individuals can access mobile Financial Services. Moving to Regulatory Environment, countries from across all of our Major Regions had strong performances on this component of the scorecard. Including peru, the philippines, ro wanda and india which all received the highest scores possible. For example, in addition to promoting mobile money intra operability in operability india has licensed several banks for under served individuals. Next lets move to the adoption findings. The data and met tricks on the adoption of traditional Financial Services are consistent from last year and so among the new fdip countries, one example is the Dominican Republic which received the highest adoption score among those new countries. Now lets turn to some of the key findings and calls to action in this years report. So across our fdip countries, one encouraging finding is there has been considerable growth and recognition that Financial Inclusion is not only important for individuals weal fair, but it can also contradict to Economic Growth and Sustainable Development goals including the ones i mentioned previously. So one Interesting Data point on this front is that as of this year all of the countries in our sample are members of Financial Inclusion oriented groups or networks. While membership in these groups is important and valuable, we also need concrete steps to emerge from their engagement. So this is where Infrastructure Investments and the regulatory components of the scorecard come into play. In addition, we also need consistent detailed data to track progress toward these goals. One example of a portal that enables countries to do that is the alliance for Financial Inclusions new data portal which is a helpful platform and we hope that more countries will take the opportunity to include timely detailed data that is available for public consumption in order to help with knowledge sharing and accountability. Moving to our next key findings, the intersection of finance and Technology Provides tremendous opportunities to accelerate progress toward Financial Inclusion. So basically fintec provides the innovative use of technology to design and deliver Financial Services on products. If that sounds like a really broad catchall term, thats because it is. But this can help enhance the accessibility and the utility of Financial Services for consumers. And render the deployment of these services more Cost Effective for providers. So for example, in a july, 2017 report by the institute of International Finance and the center for Financial Inclusion, spanish bank is working with a chiliian fintack to extend credit to individuals who may not have a typical Credit History that they have established. Were excited about these kinds of developments because they not only enable customers to Access Financial services, but they can also help it become more access si ible for individuals to use these services. So how are some countries taking fintack into account . One example is in indonesia whereas of august, 2016 the Financial Services authority provided an outline of guidelines for the local fintac industry. Initially in south africa, it is a framework is expected to form part of the conduct of Financial Institutions bill in 2017. Finally we encourage countries to amplify investments in Cyber Security efforts and knowledge sharing in order to fully reap the benefits of Financial Services innovation. So with the proliferation of digital technologies, boundaries are blurring across Traditional Financial Service Providers as well as tech start ups and other groups. So while many of these Fintech Companies are nimble and Cost Effective they may not have the resources the infrastructure or the experience to ensure that the services that they help provide are safe and secure. With that said, of course banks are also not exemt frpt from th particularly whether they have t outdated or centralized systems. One suggestion that emerged was from policy makers as well as Financial Service providers to work with technical experts to essentially provide a set of menu options, to enhance Cyber Security and provide Technical Assistance for implementing those solutions. So moving forward, we look forward to hearing from all of you regarding this years report and scorecard as well as the 2015 and 2016 reports and we will continue our efforts to facilitate dialogue regarding important Financial Inclusion dwe dw developments and the outcome of the scorecard. We havent addressed that up here. We welcome your feedback. And now thank you for listening to the presentation and i would like to invite our moderator John Villasenor as well as our panelists. Thank you very much to darrell west and robin lewis for setting the stage here and thanks to all of you for taking time out of what im sure is a very busy schedule to help us with the dialogue on this really important topic. So the organization for the remaining portion of the program is i will introduce our two panelists and i will ask a series of questions and well hear their perspectives until approximately 11 00 and then well open it up to questions that you may have and aim those things up no longer than 11 30. We may briefly introduce our panelists. Immediately to my left is camille br camille busette. A senior fellow in government studies. She also has appointments here at bookings in the Economic Policy programs. Camille has dedicated her career to expanding financial opportunities for low income populations. She came here from cgap to assist the poor where she served as the lead Financial Sector specialist. Previously she worked for the Consumer FinancialProtection Bureau, u. S. Government Financial Services regulator. She was the inaugural head of the office of financial education. To her left is diego molano. Diego is an International Consultant in the area of Digital Transformation of companies in government. He was minister of information and Communication Technologies through ict of columbia from 2010 to 2015. During his tenure columbia expanded all elements of the digital ecosystem. Internet coverage extended to low income homes in rule areas, fiber optics and High Speed Networks expanded to all mu nins pal tees. Every Rural Community with more than 100 habitats has a center.