Innovations in Finance – Wharton Global Forum São Paulo

The Innovations in Finance Panel will cover the ever evolving landscape of global finance and explore strategies shaping our economic future. Michael Roberts will guide us through this dynamic discussion. He is the William H. Lawrence professor and a professor of finance at the Wharton School. Michael brings a wealth of expertise to our panel today. He's a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and he spearheads the Wharton Financial Analytics Initiative and our Financial Proficiency Initiative. Our panelists include two distinguished leaders in the field of finance. Each bringing unique perspectives to our discussion. Our first panelist is my friend Rosana Ramos-Velita. She serves as president of both the Board of Caja Los Andes and the Board of the Wharton School for Latin America. She's also a member of the Board of the Lauder Institute. Rosanna is a prominent figure in finance, recognized as one of the 50 most powerful women in Peru by Forbes. Rosanna enriches our panel with her deep understanding of financial dynamics in the Latin American context. Our other panelist, Joao de Mello who boasts an impressive academic background and extensive experience in economics and public policy. Holding degrees from prestigious institutions such as Fundação Getúlio Vargas, PUC Rio and Stanford University, Stanford keeps coming up, right. But Wharton is a professor of public policy at the São Paulo School of Economics. He is also a partner at Opportunity Asset Management. He will offer valuable insights into the intersection of economics, policy and finance. Please join us in welcoming our moderator and panelists to the stage. Well, thank you for the introduction. I know I speak for our panelists and panelists when I say it's really a wonderful pleasure to be here with you. Um, I'd also like to gently remind you or encourage you to engage with our panel today by submitting questions via the app, which we'll tackle on the back end of our talk. So given the setting, let me jump right in with a question for Joao. Here in Brazil, A natural starting point when you think about innovation in finance is digital payments. And there's really no one better to have this discussion with at this point than Joao. Can you share with us the intent and motivation behind the Pix digital payment system and how it reconciles or correlates with the actual realized implications? But please keep in mind that not everyone in the audience has engaged directly with Pix. All right. Thanks a lot, Michael. I really appreciate it. It's an honor. First of all, Pix is a is a fast payment system is like FedNow you think of FedNow, like if it were get you be retail that would be Pix. So it's also if you a similar and was slightly inspired by UPI in India the Unified Payment Initiative motivation I think since the beginning of since at least 2012 when the Brazilian Central Bank got the regulatory mandate to regulate payment systems, that means kind of payment arrangements and rules book from like Visa, MasterCard and the central bankers, I think wanted Central Bank and the Ministry of Finance. They wanted payments to be faster and cheaper. And the mandate, the regulatory mandate was first used to push for the private sector the payment arrangements to try and provide that. That seemed like the natural place to start, I think, given the difficulties in, let's see, coordination and disperse interests of industry, I think by 2016 the Central Bank decided that they would push for a more centralized. Good afternoon, Rosana. Good afternoon. Sorry I was captivated with the previous discussion so. But I promise you I never arrived late to my Wharton classes, that's for sure. Yes, but apologies. But you make a great entrance. Thank you. I'm sure that. So the Central Bank decided to provide the lead. The payment initiative, by basically providing the regulatory framework and the settlement to the the operational settlement platform. Motivation was, again, to the idea that payments could be faster, cheaper and widely available. Fantastic. So, Rosana, perfect timing. Well, let me ask you to maybe elaborate or expand a little bit on Joao’s focus on Pix too thinking about digital payments more broadly in Latin America and perhaps other economies as well. Mm hmm. Well, first of all, thank you for sharing this conversation with you. My purpose in life and passion and I think it came when I was at Wharton and of course, the Lauder Institute, as well was asking what was going to be my impact, not at the end, but also during my successful business career. And I was lucky enough to discover microfinance when I was a CFO at Citigroup in New York, where I still live, and that led me to a path of impact, investing, and financial inclusion. And I grew up, I want to say as an investment banker, after Wharton working in in some of the leading M&A deals here in Brazil as well, in the good old times for Latin America. And now I own a very special bank. It's a microfinance bank in Peru where we are really trying to figure out and I think Marcos mentioned that before, how do we use technology to include so many millions of Latin Americans that have never had access to a loan, much less a savings account? So in Peru, we're still dealing and it's a pleasure to be with you because we look up to Pix as one of the leading platforms. And as we were discussing with Michael, I think in our countries there are different influences that can either help us innovate into something including so many Latin Americans, into the financial system. One is regulatory frameworks. It's it's the role of the central banks in our countries. And of course, is the platform, the the technology that we now have access to. So in Peru, we’re only beginning, we're still interconnecting different digital wallets. But I really hope that we can maybe I can invite you to come to Peru and visit our central bank, because what we hear about PIX and I've been asking all of my friends and everyone in the last couple of days, it really makes a difference. But those are some of the challenges in Latin America. And I think you also find individual innovators, for example. Mercado Libre, right. Which is now also a fintech platform providing access not only to the commerce part, but also getting credit and providing credit to many people that didn't have access before. I think that's a perfect segue for where I want to go to next, which is if I think about innovation in finance, which is a very broad umbrella, I mean, it's it's an incredibly exciting time. I mean, AI is at the forefront, but there's so many other technologies and changes happening in finance, particularly as it relates to consumer finance. You can think about universal and open banking and the push globally for that. Crypto's lurking in the background everywhere. So let's use this discussion, initial discussion as a stepping stone to explore, you know, beyond digital payments. What other technological innovations do you see either in place or on the horizon as playing an important role in finance moving forward? And exactly how so? Yeah, as I mentioned, Pix is mostly about payments and we view the payments as like the entrance to to financial inclusion. Well, I believe, you know, credit and liability side products are a second step. The strategy that we had in Brazil, I think the PIX experience showed us that the public sector crew could lead a very innovative technological project I think this is this is not obvious to begin with. And when we interacted with the private sector, you know, technology was always difficult as systems and legacy systems are difficult to change. And we learned with Pix that actually we knew it before because the Brazilians, they do, you know, real time across payment platforms since 2003. What is approximately what FedNow is doing now right now. But we knew that the technology part was course, you know, not a big master. Mm hmm. Then we pushed what I think is the second layer, which is, you know, technology is reducing transaction costs. And this will play itself out in an organized or unorganized manner. From the regulatory perspective, it's always better to do it in an organized way. So along with Pix, the Minister of Finance of the Central Bank pushed that what the open banking now it's called Open Finance Initiative. Just to be clear that it involves liability and insurance products as well. Mm hmm. It's a big technological endeavor, but, you know, interconnecting all our players and sharing information safely with obviously explicit consent. And the Central Bank has learned with a big process and a big governance, the Brazilian Central Bank to interact with the private sector. MM To learn from the private sector, but to use its mandate when necessary to, to implement coordination. I like to emphasize that because we did not take lightly the intrusive part of what Pix is and what and what open finance is, which means that we use in the mandate to say Pix. For instance, basically the Central Bank said and it was a sort of like an artifact of the structure of the Brazilian payment system that payment service providers be banks, credit unions, fintechs. You have to offer the product of fast payments pix, and it's mandatory if you're have more than 500,000 transaction accounts. That helps in solving the coordination problem because it's mandatory that your clients are able to make and receive this fast payments, pix. And it's mandatory that you will share a large fraction of any information about your clients with other players. And we we know that this is intrusive and it's it's a little heavy handed, but sometimes it's necessary to solve coordination problems. When you're talking about open finance. A major thing is what exactly are the specific investments that players made in acquiring information and how to remunerate them. And when you intervene with open finance, basically you’re saying, this information that you produced that you might had an expectation of return on it, will be shared and this should not be taken lightly. The Central Bank took this step, having the tradeoffs in mind, and I'm very hopeful about open finance. I think it's a it's a major avenue for now, inclusion and liability in insurance products. And I think the third step will be credit, because underwriting credit is always trickier. Yes. You want to expand on that? Absolutely. I mean, and maybe I'll take the area of my current expertise, which is financial inclusion and all the work that we are trying to to do in order to use digital payments and forward looking technology to include more people into into the financial world. So one area that I'm very excited about and and I know we will hear more about Wharton's AI initiative during the next couple of days is that in the world of the unbanked and many of us come from Latin America, but this also happens across the globe, billions of people, especially women. Microfinance or micro-enterprises run by mothers which are highly profitable yet lack access to capital. Like we all know what that is, right? The role of a financial institution such as mine, Caja Los Andes. And this is too because we're a regulated license in in our case, we really have a banking license. We take deposits from the public and we take that regulation very seriously, is that we have to demonstrate to the regulators that the credit underwriting process has to be at par as if we were a commercial bank. So imagine trying to go to a little field and visit a family up in the mountains of Peru, and we're going to see how many cows this family has or how many kilos of quinoa these families are growing. And our loan officer has to go there, visit the cows and figure out how many liters of milk they're producing. Actually, we value them as hard assets in our. But we do have balance sheet and P&L for every microenterprise that's extremely costing. And it takes a long time to get to scale because the loans are $1,000, $1,500 dollars. So scale, as we know in banking, is it's pivotal. Now where I think we can use technology at the forefront and I think maybe AI is in developing underwriting models for the unbanked, right. We are able since I was at Citi with, you know, FICO and all the credit cards and now many digital banks here in Brazil, in Latin America as well, it's relatively easier right, to take their data from us because everybody or all the banks know how much we make, our credit behavior. All the patterns that we we have already online and you can create these models and very easily, easier now target to each of us. What is the type of financial need that you that you need right now and sometimes match it to a commercial product, But that data doesn't exist for a person that's never had a loan and doesn't have a bank account. So we're still in in in this period of exploration and I think innovation to try to figure out all other sets of data that might tell us what their projected behavior would be or and I think of in finance is also very important there because it's not only about credit too, for financial inclusion, it's also about trying to figure out how we help or how we structure products for people who already save, but they save in a different way than we do, you know, not pension funds or stocks or even savings accounts. They do little groups and they save $100 each. And then together they invest in something. So they have different techniques of savings and insurance. Right. But that data, we would never consider it financial data for underwriting and regulatory purposes. So I think that's a very interesting new frontier. And I think really with technology, data analytics, we might be able to create something interesting there. Yeah. So it's very exciting to listen to the enthusiasm that you both express with the potential for technology, digital transformation to impact financial inclusion, potentially financial literacy, social welfare more broadly. But the academic in me can't resist. But asked when I think about innovation in general, right, I think in terms of stimuli and conditions under which innovation can flourish. And I think about impediments that inhibit innovation and progress, stimuli being perhaps things like efficient capital markets, things like strong legal system, property rights, contract enforcement and impediments on the other side, you know, market imperfections, imperfect competition, you know, entrenched interests, etc. So I'm hoping you can lay out for us what are some of the necessary conditions for the innovation you speak of to actually flourish and realize the progress we hope that comes with that innovation? And what do you see are the impediments to that progress, recognizing that in many ways, innovation, the point of innovation is to generate the conditions for that progress? There's a little bit of a chicken and egg there, so Rosana, you want to start us off? Certainly. But that is that is a great question. I think instead of in terms of stimuli or what really motivates innovation, no matter where you are in the world right now, you know that technology has changed our lives. And whatever you are in the economic spectrum, that technology is really affecting your life the way you live, the way you communicate, and also your finance as well. I think in some of the large banks and, you know, I'm very proud ex-Citi banker, many of our legacy decisions were a bit of an impediment to really go to the next level of digital transformation. But I think now it's really easily catching up. But I think it's also the central banks roles and regulators in our countries which are very different and it's exciting to hear, for example, Brazil to speak about open finance. There are several countries, even the Philippines also has a very good framework already that work that it's allowed. And we have other countries that are still lagging. And when you don't have regulations or at least some, you know, guardrails where you are able to innovate because you need those guardrails for sure, because you are talking about savings and license banks, I understand that. But if they are not at par with what's going on with technology and where other countries are really advancing, we lag. And then the catching up could be, you know, more costly, especially in terms of CapEx investment because technology changes so rapidly. But I think the the negative effect is really in the in the customer, right? Because by now we should have access to all of these platforms that are that exist in many different countries. But perhaps in some markets, we have really entrenched interests, as you mentioned, that limit competition as well. Yeah. Joao? I have a very, very optimistic view on technology. So I think technology will solve the problem. As I said, it could be in an organized or disorganized way, micro microlending, for instance, if if it costs you like a couple of dollars to for a wire transfer, that makes pretty uneconomical. So all microfinance, that's why attacking payments first was I think, a good strategy. The technology will reduce transaction costs tremendously, and I think that will sort itself out. I'm trying to, you know, put my public servant hat on again. What would be the role of the public sector then? I think that's, that's the crucial one. From a regulatory perspective, I think if you if you have a strong regulatory mandate, you know, let's see, generally a safe institutional environment where I think regulators can do a lot like like I think Brazil showed and India showed with Pix, UPI and now Brazil open finance. From the public sector side or like collective action side and from from an emerging economy perspective, I think the trickier part is contract enforcement. Information sharing, I think it's fine. We're going to face a lot of challenges with privacy and and digital theft. But I think those are if you can handle those. Contract enforcement is I think there's a trickier part for for emerging emerging. And that's why I said I think credit underwriting is trickier because of that. We can have transaction costs as low as we can, so then we can collateralize as many little assets that people have in order to underwrite credit. But if contract enforcement is not there, I think it's kind of moot. MM So our strategy here was include through payments because technology and bundled payment from the banking services payment payments will produce information that you include which something that I think for financial inclusion for the for the most fragile population is even more important, which is insurance even before credit. Well then you produce information and share information. Technology and competition will do their jobs. When it comes to credit, all the of information sharing of and I'm very optimistic. The other part of this contract enforcement is trickier and I think we're improving over time. But that's the one that we as a society, for instance, in Brazil now we have to focus so we can enforce credit contracts. And I think that the private sector will do its job and technology will do its wonders. Okay, Very good. So it's interesting. We're we're sitting here talking about financial inclusion. We're talking about P&Ls and balance sheets with livestock. That's a first for me. But I use the pictures. I look forward to seeing them. But but I can't help but think, you know, digital digital payments is sort of an entry way towards financial inclusion makes sense to me and many because there's a low sort of cognitive or trust burden when it comes to payment systems. But if we want to think a little bit more broadly about financial inclusion, as Rosana has pointed out, I think we need to start thinking about issues like trust, like financial education, literacy. And so where in this innovative landscape does that enter? That's a great one. Oh, I’ll take the benefit of a second move advantage. I take the first mover advantage on this one I think and this is from my experience, right. And when you when you get involved and passionate about investing, you know, bringing capital for social impact, you open up your mind and start learning different things that perhaps they. Dean James is not here, right? Okay. But they didn't teach us at Wharton which is, think of your customers as human beings, right? Think of them not just as one more data point or one more number in a regression analysis, but how you're bringing services, mainly capital and impacting the life of that family. And that's a different equation or a different mindset that we have to blend in as bankers because at the end it is a banking model and has to be so to have impact. So when we speak about trust and education and helping the majority in the world again, mainly women, productive women. Trust new ways of doing, getting financial services, getting insurance, savings. There is a gap. First of all, female entrepreneurs in developing markets have never been considered a key segment of our markets, right? In general from financial service. So maybe I'm a little much, but I have been in both worlds. So when you sit with her and you understand her needs and you know that she has an Excel faster than what we have because she lives day to day with a few dollars that she has to turn around, sell her tacos or, you know, potatoes or feed her livestock and calculate how much I'm going to sell that day, how much I'm going to pay to whatever my expenses are. Laborers, so that the the leftover is going to be used to feed my children. Right? That's an equation. It's a mathematical equation. But it's also very emotional. Right. Because her priorities might be different that what when we run an algorithm. She's thinking about her children first. So when we think about building trust in these new technologies and using technology for all of these purposes to bring in more people into the financial world is to understand that their needs are very different. That I think I used to think about when I was at Citi or when I was an investment banker. We have to figure out what are those hurdles for them to understand the technology and trust it. So for example, even though they all know that cash is very dangerous, especially in poor areas, they prefer to have that because, you know, traditionally they were never served by a bank. So now that we're bringing something in, in an internet forum on a cell phone that will not only replace a branch and a manager and all of that, but say here's going here's where you're going to have your money, but you're never going to see it because it's all digital. It's a huge gap. So that's that's an interesting part, I think, of the puzzle that we need to solve as we try to build financial trust. Basically. It is. And it it's very interesting to hear that perspective from a from a from Peru. This is precisely one of the things that we most we were most anxious about with Pix is whether I think the fact that it was instantaneous, the fact that it was all digital and people would take it, we were very positively surprised by the uptake in of of Pix and in the sense that we thought there would be a trust problem that there wasn't. With the benefit of hindsight, at least in Brazil, I think the general public was very is very fluent in digital like payments because of that, and especially not to so young generation, because of the history of hyperinflation. And hyperinflation does wonders for financial education. It's very bad. For financial education is it does wonders. So in terms of payment, we we thought that we wanted that hurdle and we didn't, but to be very concrete about your question, Michael. After my my period in public service service, I, I have less convictions about let's see how paternalizing we have to be with some financial products. And I'm going to give you a very concrete example. In Brazil, we have a it's called a severance fund. It's financed by sort of like a payroll tax. And it's and it's but it's it's it's individual. It's at the individual level. It's in your name and it's managed by the by the government. And you can access those funds if you get fired or when you retire. Technology that does wonders with transaction costs as over the last let's over the last six or seven years, we've seen the possibility of using those funds as collateral for personal credit. So on the technology side, that's solved. We have the systems bank and lend to someone and that would be collateralized by their sovereigns funds. If they don't pay, then the bank will automatically let’s just say exercise that collateral and the collateral are basically managed by and the fund is managed by the the bigger public savings and loans institutions that we have in Brazil, federal level, But also it's it's actually very easy. And we have, you know, market structure is fairly concentrated. So in terms of system, you have to plug in, I don't know, nine players different from the US that you would have to plug in. I don't know at least a thousand players to make it, but I have nowadays I have serious doubts on whether, you know, the technology solved it. But how do you regulate that? Should we allow the person to club to use and collateralize all its sovereigns fund? And what about, you know, macro shocks that will not eventually could wipe those out? Are the discount rates personal discount rates that people have reasonable? Are they making, you know, educated decisions? I think hyperinflation does wonders in terms of financial education for payments for credit as well, but not necessarily I think people. So I've I've came into public service with a much more less paternalizing thinking than I am now, especially when we talk about consumer finance. I think it's a little bit the experience as a regulator at the central bank and seeing individual cases that as an economist you don't want to, you know, get to the special case and generalize it because we know that it's bad for prices if we. But I just as a society is, we're going to have to face this problem. And the problem of privacy. I think privacy is it's it's it's easier to solve than than that one. Well well, that's the perfect transition to some questions from our audience, because one thing you can't ignore when we think about innovation is risk. And so whether it's digital payments, whether it's integrating AI into microfinance or AI into anything for that matter, you know, what are some of the salient risks facing both consumers in terms of uptake and financial inclusion, as well as the institutions that are implementing these innovations? Well, I'll take this one first. For one. Well, as I said privacy I think it's going to be a big one, including, let's say, unbanked women. And you could say, well, you know, data handling is not a problem anymore. You know, big regression models and then solved it. But and we can use data on, you know social media and a lot of other sources that are non-bank sources to try and underwrite lending. How do you get educated consent? Well, explicit consent, I think. And and people understanding what they're consenting to, I think it's a big challenge. Digital theft and systems running wild is was at least my big nightmare as far as banking sector regulator that I was more on the licensing side but also on the licensing. I try to live with supervision. I think that's a big one and that's that these are like Black Swans event that can destroy trust, especially payments. The feeling of a bank disappearing from your from your checking account, money disappearing from a checking account. I think this is like something that is almost insurmountable if it happens. As I said, I think there will be an increased role for for financial and payments regulation because it's technology does wonders, but it's better if it does it in a more organized way. I think you will do it either way, but I think we are going to have to trust a little bit more the regulators on this one and try to organize and try to correct for some excesses that technology might have. Don't internalize, you know, if there is a bank run because there is a system, a problem In the system that some ran a ran a faux, the stockholders of big tech companies are not going to internalize the full costs of that. Now, I think they're they're limited by, you know, being wiped out of their equity share. But I think the cost to society is much harder than that. So that's why I think we're going to have to on the trade off, we're going to have to go a little bit more on the regulation side. I'm sure from an externality standpoint, we need government to step in, but that doesn't remove the responsibility from the private sector. And so, Rosana, I wonder if you can kind of expand and along those dimensions as well as any other additional risks you might see. Yeah, well I always think of my business as a risk reward proposition, right? And, and I think also thinking of progress, economic development, not using technology, I think it's a higher risk than, you know, cybersecurity or, or all the other issues that we have to solve because I think it's a matter of of really helping, especially developing economies take a leap, increase the market share, increase the markets themselves, create new customers that are active that are productive, that can have access, and therefore create more local economies and increase our GDPs. I think certainly in Latin America, the political risk continues to be extremely high and we have some movers and shakers across the region you know in Mexico a few days ago and we have a lot of friends from there and also here in Brazil and the rest of of the continent as well. So to me is keeping keeping the private sector and especially the central banks, independent. Right. And that's not interventions that sometimes I think it's probably the highest risk in many in many developing countries. Right. Independence of the central banks and bank regulators, so that we can have economies that have an opportunity to innovate and continue to grow and independence from political considerations as well. Yes. Okay, wonderful. So let me let me, with our remaining time, turn to a couple more questions from our audience. So again, please feel free to engage through the app. So one question that we had was, you know, you mentioned AI Rosana, a little bit earlier, to what extent do you see it lifting barriers both for micro-financing when you have limited data on applicants, which is sort of the exact opposite of what AI needs and what is your perspective on creating some sort of financial data history for the unbanked or those that are excluded from the financial system? That seems like a a supreme challenge in some sense. Absolutely. And for that I might need some Wharton undergrads to work on this. I think. Um, but I think there are already huge sets of data in what we call the informal market or the markets of the unbanked. There are not captured as financial data. So for example, in some of the work that we're doing in Los Andes, this we are capturing our clients use of well, Facebook, WhatsApp, right, and YouTube. Those three medium, they don't use it necessarily yet for financial decisions, but it's giving us behavioral data, right. As to who are they sending messages to, what can we send to them through WhatsApp? And they see it not not, not see it, use it or not use it. Right. So that's a very, very practical and efficient channel for the world right now. How they get information through Facebook, YouTube, the other media and start to try out different pilots and see through this media, are they really, you know, catching the information that I'm sending and are they converting into a financial product? So that data is out there. Maybe we it's probably it needs to be structured and thought of as predictors for underwriting purposes perhaps. But but I think there is plenty of data that we can capture, organize it, and use it maybe in a different way. So so that begs the question and it comes back to something Joao mentioned earlier about data privacy in the role of regulation of the government. Do they know their data is being captured and to what extent is that data kept siloed and and confidential? Yes. And I think that's one of in general right policies. So we have a very strict data policy around it in the country. So the clients know exactly that we have that data and that it's only used for our own purposes or within the institution with their consent. Right? So the idea is so that at the end they also want to have a loan at a lower rate, you know, longer terms. So with this data, hopefully that should be a way that we can provide better terms for our clients. Right. Got as part of it. So Joao how can governments step in and help with recourse for the consumer, be it in terms of payment systems, some sort of fraud, theft? I mean, that is just such a central concern, especially among older people like myself. Um, you know, how, how can regulation help with recourse when when the private sector it's not in their interest to help? Other people like you and I. Not Rosana. I think technology I agree with you it's a major opportunity and it's not a choice. We cannot put the genie back in the bottle. So just let's try and make the best of it. I have recourses and I think it's an important consumer policy issue. Yeah. In terms of theft for instance digital theft? You know, you I think that I think the payment system in general is more is better equipped to deal with it than the individual consumer meaning that I think up to a certain amount of whatever theft is, you just have to I think law or regulation, I have to say you just compensate and pay for it and spread out, of course, through this whole process. I think it's much more efficient that way and it builds trust. Obviously, you're going to say, well, what if you have a plug in and a plug in and password card and the system has the, you know, recorded of the person actually put their PIN number there. But, you know, the cost of, you know, splitting these hairs are so huge and the insurance benefit from spreading the cost through the system, I think it's low. So that one I think it's very easy to deal with law. Obviously and at a very general level, if you have like, you know, weak institutions and so on and so forth. And my whole argument is a little weakened. But having fairly enough clear well, even if it's very interventionist, if it's clear and courts interpret it as like pro-consumer or pro banks, I don't care. I think it's just a to interpret it in in a systematic way, it spreads to the cost for the system and it's fine. We for instance in Brazil, we have a privacy law that is fully inspired, basically copied from the General Data Protection Directive of the European Union that I viewed it first as very interventionist and this would increase costs a lot. I say, well, actually it doesn’t, and the private sector deals with it and it spreads the cost through the system. And I think it's a very cheap price to pay. And this is, I think, one of the ways to not making sure, but reducing the risks, the technology will run afoul and and benefiting fully from the opportunities. Again, it's not a choice I don't view it as a choice. It's all there. Yeah. And I think when when you think of like that, it becomes clear that don't fight it, regulate it. Okay. Very good. And I'm going to squeeze in one more question being cognizant of time. So this is from our audience. Where is crypto going to be in this innovative space in the next five, ten years? Yeah, both from the private perspective as well as the former public servant perspective. I think the technology's here to stay. I think it is how you know, how we use it and for what purpose, right? I mean, I don't necessarily know if it's a currency like bitcoin, etc., or is really the infrastructure and the technology behind that. MM Peru, for example, is right now in the midst of the central bank creating a digital coin. Right. It's, it's a crypto, uh, you know, type of currency. So I think it's, it's here and it's just how we're going to use it and work well with the central banks and their position in terms of what is it, are we, are we moving into a digital currency? Is that the case? Is it going to be supported and issued by the central bank or are we going to have private platforms with the risks that we already have experienced in developed countries. Wonderful. Joao, you get 5 seconds. Crypto. I view it as one as a distributed ledger technology. I think it's fantastic. Transaction costs a lot and it's all for the good. As an investment vehicle, I think it's like any other ones. As a payment vehicle, I'm a little more reluctant. I think for instance, it's attractiveness in a country like Brazil is reduced a lot with Pix, for instance. Okay, but it would be as attractive as, as a more organized a fast payment system, a place has. Wonderful. Please join me in thanking our panelists. Thank you.