Impact change. That will be focused on the rise of technologies, this is about 90 minutes. I would like to welcome you to our forum on Financial Inclusion, we are web casting this event live, so wed like to welcome our viewers and also those of you who have tuned in via cspan for those of you who are wishing to post comments during the forum, we have set up a feed at financialinclusion, you are willing to make any comments you would like. There are nearly 2 billion adults globally, who do not have Bank Accounts. This makes it difficult to Access Financial services, pay bills or transfer money to relatives. In those situations, its difficult to be an entrepreneur. The good news is that many nations have made commitments to expanding Financial Services to the poor, they understand that Financial Inclusion is vital to economic development. They are developing Financial Inclusion policies and implem t implementing a new framework that encourages inclusion, today, robin lewis and myself are launching our third annual brookings scorecard with the support of the bill and Melinda Gates foundation. The short summary is that weve seen progress on Financial Services in many places. This is happening through mobil money and digital Financial Services. As part of our research, we got detailed suggestions from every community. 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 and associate fellow with brookings. With that, i will turn it over to robin. Good morning. Thank to darryl for those remarks, and our insire thanks to all of you for joining us this morning. Either here at brookings or via live stream im looking forward to providing a brief overview of approach and key findings, before we turn it over to the panel discussion. First id like to start with a brief overview of our project. The financial and Digital Inclusion project was launched in 2014. The purpose of the project is to provide policy makers, private sector representatives, nongovernmental organizations and the general public with information that can help improve Financial Inclusion in the focused countries and around the world. Why does Financial Inclusion matter . Financial inclusion matters because it provides pathways for people to improve their Financial Health which contributes to their overall well being. Beyond that, Poverty Reduction and gender equality. To support our overall objective, over the past three years, we have selected a series of politically and diverse companies. Lets talk briefly about the report we are launching today. This is the third annual report, and as with the first two reports, we examined access to and usage of financial sources, across diverse country contacts. 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. We have disuntilled and updated the Country Profiles we featured in 2015 and 2016. In addition to these highlights, and recent updates, we have inclu included some key next steps for Financial Inclusion. Given the scope of our sample, these lists are not exhaustive, but we do believe they capture an important snapshot for future growth. As darryl mentioned, one of the components of our report is a scorecard tool. We identified four dimensions of Financial Inclusion, including country commitment, mobil capacity. Regulatory environment and the adoption of formal Financial Services. We maintain the same list as in the previous year, in which we added five new countries to diversify our sample. These countries include egypt, el salvador, haiti and vietnam. Well dive into the dim erngs level findings shortly, heres our preview of the 2017 scorecard. The top scoring cants are generally distributed across latin america and sub is a haren africa. Countries in other regions demonstrated strong performances as well. For the third year in a row, kenya received the top place on our scorecard. Widespread adoption of mobil money services. With that said, a number of other top scoring countries have experienced lower level of adoption to date, but often have robust take june of Card Services as well as nontraditional Access Points. We think that this finding should be very encouraging to the Financial Inclusion community because it demonstrates that countries with economic and geographic environments can pursue different pathways for Financial Inclusion. Well briefly walkthrough some of the indicators across the four dimensions before we explore our findings. Country commitment indicators include the existence of comprehensive strategies. These indicators help give us a sense of whether countries are willing to work collaboratively across sectors. Moving to mobil capacity we measured this because it includes indicators of mobil infrastructure. While Digital Inclusion services extend far beyond mobil money. It can provide a platform for those who are typically underserved to Access Financial services. Moving to Regulatory Environment. We look at whether regulations concerning electronic money and other forms of digital Financial Services have been issued. We have also looked at intramoney platform. Can customers of one service send payments to members of another mobil money service. Finally, moving to the adoption indicators, we focused on account adoption with both more traditional providers, as well as money providers, across underserved groups in particular. All the date de in this set is from the world banks global database, we look forward to upskating the data as the new data set is released. First, lets begin with the country commitment dimension and touch on a few examples of countrys progress. Mexico increased its overall score to join the top five scoring countries. In june of 2017, the National Council released the National Fine inclusion plan the governor of mexico also enjoyed the cash alliance. El salvador is an example of a country that boosted its score by five Percentage Points over the last year. Partly due to the increase of smart phones. 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, india and rwanda. India has licensed several entities as payment banks which has hoped to increase Access Points for undersivged individuals. Lets move to our adoption findings. The data and metrics are consistent from last year among the new countries that were added in 2016, one example is the Dominican Republic which received the highest score. Lets turn to some of the key findings and calls to action in this years report. There has been considerable growth and recognition that federal inclusion is not only important for individuals but it can contribute to growth and sustainable goals. One Interesting Data point on this front is that as of this year all of the countries in our sample are members of groups or networks. We need concrete steps to emerge from their engagement. 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. A portal that allows countries do do that is the Data Alliance platform. We hope more countries will take the opportunity to include timely detailed Data Available for public consumption. Moving to our next key finding, the intersection of finance and Technology Provides tremendous opportunities to accelerate progress toward Financial Inclusion. Basically, it involves the innovative use of technology to design Financial Services and products. If that sounds like a really broad catch all term, thats because it is. This can help enhance the accessibility for consumers and render the deployment of these services more Cost Effective for these providers. In a 2017 report for the institute of national finance. And the center for Financial Inclusion a spanish bank is working to extend Credit Access to individuals who may not have a typical Credit History they have established. They not only enable customers to Access Financial services, they can help it become more accessible for individuals to use these services. In indonesia, as of august 2016, the Financial Services authority provided an outline of guidelines for the local industry. Additionally, in south africa, theyre increasingly prevalent and a Regulatory 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, in order to fully repeat the benefits of Financial Services innovation, with the proliferation of digital technologies, boundaries are blurring across Traditional Financial Service Providers as well as Tech Startups and other groups. While many of these companies are very nimble and Cost Effective they may not have the resources, the infrastructure or the experience to ensure the services they help provide are safe and secure. With that said, banks are not exempt from this. In a conversation with many stakeholders we had in february of this year, one suggestion that emerge s was from policy makers as well as Service Providers to enhance Cyber Security, and provide technical assistance. For implementing those solutions. We look forward to hearing from all of you regarding this years report and scorecard as well as the 2015 and 2016 reports. We will continue our efforts to facilitate dialogue we have an address set up here at brookings. Edu, where we welcome your feedback. And now, thank you for listening to the presentation, i would like to invite our moderator to the stage to share their perspectives on financial inclusi inclusion. Thank you very much for setting the stage here, and thanks to all of you for taking time out of what im sure is a busy schedule to help with this dialogue. Ill introduce our two panelists and i will ask a series of questions, and well hear their perspectives until approximately 11 00, and well open it up to questions you may have and aim those things up no longer than 11 30, with that as a agenda setting, immediately to my left is camille, director of the brookings race, prosperity and inclusion initiative, and a senior fellow in government studies. Camille has deads indicated her career, she came to brookings from cgap. Previously she worked for the Consumer FinancialProtection Bureau, where she served as the agencys inaugural head of the office of financial education, to her left, we have diego milano. Diego is an International Consultant in the area of Digital Transformation in companies and government. He was minister of information and Communication Technologies through the ict of columbia, during his tenure, not only infrastructure, but services, applications and users. Fiberoptics, even those in the middle of the amazon. Education, health, banking and Government Services were transformed. Im very privileged to have these two panelists with us, im going to start off with an initial question that ill direct to camille and then ill have a question for you, diego. Camille, as mentioned a moment ago, you are the director of the race, prosperity and inclusion initiative. Can you explain why Financial Inclusion matters, including low income individuals and communities of color . Sure, thanks for the question. Im really happy to be here discussing Financial Inclusion, not only globally, but domestically, a lot of people are aware of the fact that we have 10 Million People who are unbanked and another 25 million who are underbanked. Meaning they dont have access to the full suite of Financial Services and products. What that means here is a couple 24i7ks, just generally, not having access to Financial Services makes it difficult to save money. And to be prepared for emergencies. But also makes it difficult to start investing and creating a foundation for wealth creation. When we dont have that, particularly in the United States where leverage is really important to Building Wealth and particularly important to transferring intergenerational wealth, not having the services and not being included in the Financial System makes it difficult to make strides. You see that here in the u. S. , because a lot of the people who are not formally banked, tend to be communities of color. We have a large racial income gap as well as wealth gap, and some of that is attributed to the fact that we do not include a lot of africanamericans, latinos and others in the formal Financial System. In the u. S. , for the median wealth accumulated by white households is 111,000, and for africanamerican households its 7,000. That gives you an idea of just the disparity and why its so important to have folks included in the Financial System . Thank you very much. Diego, given your expertise and experience in ict, can you share some examples of ways you have seen or expect to see Digital Technology transforming the Digital Services sector. Thank you so much for the invite today. As camille was saying, we have many, many, many challenges in terms of Financial Inclusion everywhere in the world. One of the main ones is infrastructure. How do you get to banks with everybody. Through technology, thats the solution. Thats whats happening. Im sure most of you guys know the example in africa, you know, many technical operators are moving in that direction. But having access to technology is not enough. We are proving that in most countries, just around 50 of people are internet users. No more than 85 of people are already covered by networks. Why . Because there is no applications for them. Why you use internet, they answered, it is useless for me. It doesnt change my life. Basically we have to work not only in the infrastructure, in developing more solutions. And thats part of what the Financial Sector is doing. The Financial Sector is starting to use this technology for mobil payments, and then some Financial Services, not only that, the future of that is huge. In digital identification. The impact of reducing poverty is huge. How you make sure that people have an id. If you see today, the Financial Sector is the one that has the pull to create i. D. Platforms for everybody. Secondly, you know, most of the credit given in the whole world is based on so now the Financial Sector has the power to move that to digital. And help people to get credit easier, instead of going to the traditional paper state owned registries, the service can also move to detail and transform completely the way credit is given today. Thank you very much for both of your interesting perspectives there. The next question is relates to the United States. And this is as robin mentioned. This is the third year in which weve been doing this. Our project has been looking at the set of countries robin alluded to a few moments ago. Theres a very significant whatever comes your way. Some number of tens of millions of people excluded