Many of the governments are seeking to do,
and the financial services industry is a part of this,
is they are very much wanting the banking industry to make
inclusion a number one priority. So across all of these countries,
what are they really forcing the banks to do is to get
populations right across the board, uh, to open bank accounts,
provide them with, uh, not necessarily credit cards, but debit cards,
provide them with life insurance,
all of those sorts of things so that they're included and put into the financial
services system.
What that is also enabling them to do is any subsidy that they're paying
to the populations is now paid directly from the bank accounts.
And that's having a couple of advantages. One is, you know,
there's a huge amount of kind of trouble out there, which is corruption.
Uh, so by,
by making sure that the money is actually going directly into the bank accounts
is radically reducing the amount of leakage that there is,
the money actually gets to where it needs to get to.
But the other part which is ironic is, uh,
the household knows how much money has now come in and the household is able to
use the money. So, you know, the,
the issue that you have in a number of these situations where, you know,
the men get the money and they drink it away and the household doesn't see it,
that's starting to disappear as well. So it's really helping, uh,
the families in terms of what needs to happen.
The other thing that one or two of these countries have done very effectively is
that they've provided these, what they call small banking licences.
So they've actually encouraged a lot of new players who are essentially, um,
you know, FinTech type of businesses,
challenger bank type of businesses that have been given banking licences
exclusively to go after the rural, uh, population. So those,
those people's businesses very much around, um, uh, around financial inclusion.
I mean, there are millions and millions of accounts here.
So even if the ticket value of every single transaction is much smaller than
what you would expect in an urban area, what you would expect in the west,
because the volumes are so huge,
the amount of money that they make is astronomical.
The thing that's really galvanised the banking industry in,
you know, that part of the world has been the technology companies, right?
So the big technology companies and, and,
and it started out very much from the technology companies that came from China.
So it was Alibaba and Tencent were getting into the financial services business
in a really huge way.
And what the banks were starting to see was, you know,
it started out initially with payments, but it went from payments to lending.
It then started to go even into, you know, mutual funds and things like that.
And a number of banking CEOs were starting to say that, you know,
this wasn't a question of losing a little bit of market share.
It wasn't a question of, you know, having a little bit of squeezing on margins.
What they were actually seeing was whole roughs of their business disappearing
overnight. It was like their version,
it was the banking version of a Kodak moment, right? And the, and,
and if, if the banks didn't start to respond to that, as I say,
they were going to see business being completely wiped out.
A lot of the banks pay every single bank offers, uh,
this ability for you to do your financial in the UK, you know,
your financial planning, your budgeting, and,
and they're coming out with all of these adverse talking about you in the cost
of living crisis.
We've got all of these tools where you can kind of look at budgeting, et cetera.
What I mean, that's fantastic, that's great.
But what we've been trying to say to them is,
why don't you get an ecosystem together that will bring all of the providers
that will be necessary for people to deal with the problems around their heating
and energy costs, right? Where do I get government grants from?
Where do I go if I want to put insulation into my house?
Where do I go if I need to get a heat pump?
All of the different providers that are out there at the moment,
it's the nightmare for any customer, even a sophisticated customer,
to be able to do the research and find who the right player would be for each
one of those things, right?
Whereas a bank could easily bring that ecosystem together and have it on a
platform, I think they'd clean up if they did, um,
if they did something like that.
I've come across very few examples of those sorts of transformations
where, you know,
you don't have a chief executive and a management
team with the capabilities to drive that particular transformation. You know,
you look at some of these people, they're not highly extroverted,
charismatic leaders who are, you know, standing on platforms and waving,
um, you know, waving flags. You don't need to be that sort of a leader,
but I think you need to be a leader who is, uh, you know,
able to set a very clear vision and is able to make sure
that, um, uh, you know, the team is gonna pull in that direction.