the kremlin is painting the fighting as an anti—terrorist operation. and gold for ethiopia's tamirat tola as he wins the men's marathon on the final weekend of the paris olympics. team usa face france in the blockbuster mens basketball final in the coming hours. there are 39 gold medals up for grabs in today's events. all the olympic action continues on bbc one. now on bbc news...talking business hello and welcome to talking business with me, mark lobel. let's have a look at what's on the show. it's the grocers who have to deal with angry housewives. money isn't what it used to be.

here in the uk, we may have a new monarch on our banknotes, but paper cash is definitely no longer king. in fact, in many places here and around the world, it's almost becoming impossible to get hold of and use. if your local village doesn't have a cash machine, goodness knows how far you got to travel just to have access to your own money. as digital banking conquers the globe, what does it mean for those who can't get or won't get a bank account? is going digital making financial exclusion even more difficult? or could it be for billions of people, a solution giving them access to a global system they couldn't otherwise access? i'll be discussing all of that with these two. daryl collins, who tracks how people living on less than $2 a day organise their money, and harish natarajan, the financial inclusion supremo at the world bank. and later in the show, what does the digital money revolution mean for business? we'll hear from the boss of airwallex about building a $5 billion company, easing

payments across our global borders. wherever you'rejoining me from around the world, once again, a big hello and a warm welcome to the show. the long term legacy of the extraordinary global covid pandemic is becoming apparent. lockdowns cleared the streets of the world's cities, shut down many of our places of work. and yet one of the most fundamental changes it provoked to the world of business and money is often overlooked. the disappearance of paper money or cash from many of our lives. so when the world went into lockdown and cash payments largely disappeared, the need to have access to a bank account so you can pay for things digitally became even greater. and for some, like caroline corley from scotland, it's a change that they feel they are paying for. without a current account, you can't do anything. you can't set up direct debits, you don't have a debit card trying to use cash machines, and it really excludes you from being able

to make the best deals and best offers that are available for utilities, for your phone, for internet. without an account, you can't do any of that. we will never be truly a fully cashless society, but it isn't helpful that it's making it harder and harder and harder to access cash. and there's also something about the physicality of it. it's much easier to control your spending when it's physically in your hand, and if you are low income and you just want to pop to the shop for a pint of milk, a lot of places will want you to have cash. so i don't think the need will ever fully go away. but the access and availability will become increasingly difficult and that will affect the poorest and the most vulnerable. in the middle of the lockdown years 2021, the world bank updated its global financial index. it revealed that around three quarters of people in the world now

have a bank or mobile money account. a 50%jump injust a decade, including an incredible 71% of people in sub—saharan africa, where entire communities werejumping straight to digitalfinance. in fact, the spurt in africa follows rapid growth of digital finance across china and in india even before the pandemic. but of course, that big number that three quarters of the world's population is in the system means that practically a quarter of the world. so billions of people, are not. so how do you get by when you're not included and what should be done? my first guest is the co—author of the book portfolios of the poor. she continues to track how thousands of families, and in particular women who live on less than $2 a day, she's an academic and co—founder of decoded, an organisation which uses technology to listen to and monitor the lives of financially vulnerable populations for clients including paypal, visa and the central bank of ghana. daryl collins, welcome to the show.

i wanted to start by asking you how big an impact you think covid and the lockdown had on digital finance, as we saw cash largely disappear at the time? well, mark, covid had an absolutely huge impact on digital payments and the use of cash in general. in fact, it's been so big that we have learned that any data on financial inclusion or payments that was collected before covid really can't be counted because it's changed so much over that covid time period. what prompted such a shift? well, mark, ithink that a big part of what happened was on the merchant payments so people would be paying with digital rather than cash. and that made a tremendous difference, because in the years of digital financial inclusion, one of the toughest nuts to crack has been merchant payments.

a typical use case has been sending money home. so in other words, people sending money to other people. that was one of the first use cases of m—pesa, which is the famous mobile money application in kenya. it was initially used for children, adult children working in the city to send money to their parents in the urban. and the rural areas. a difference, isn't there, between digital banking and using digital money in a simple wayjust to make payments. can you tell us are there more people now using digital money but who still don't have access to financial products and services like loans and credit? so, mark, they're all intertwined in the developing world. people really start with digital payments because they really are _ incredibly useful for sending money back and forth to relatives and to others, especially

in times of emergencies. increasingly, bank accounts are attached to digital payments, and so people push money back and forth within that bank account and into their payment wallet. that's particularly happening in nigeria. a little bit less so as we go into kenya, because m—pesa has served a purpose for so long. people might actually even save money directly in their mobile wallets as a way to put money aside. but there is an incredibly rich informal savings mechanisms that are very well alive all across the world in lower income households, in particular savings groups, where especially women would come together and put money into an informal savings group and be able to take out lump sums on a periodic basis.

and so it's a little bit difficult to think about shifting that behaviour into a bank account or into a savings account when it works so incredibly well in the informal sector. looking specifically at women in developing countries, how have their money habits changed as cash has become less important? i think the biggest change has been for women led small businesses. it's been incredibly important for women, small businesses to accept digital payments, but even more so how they have sold their goods. they're increasingly using facebook, instagram to market goods and then following up on whatsapp to make sure that they have the sale. now, the biggest challenge from here is using marketplaces, either something like facebook marketplace or one of the home—grown marketplaces in africa called jumia, and being able to have

digital payment rather than cash on delivery. that type of frontier hasn't really caught on yet. we haven't figured out how to convince people to actually make a digital payment before the goods arrive. people are very concerned and have had some experience that they might have gotten a good that they didn't want. now, for women running that small business, getting onto a marketplace is what they say is the biggest impact on growing their sales, because it makes them broader and wider, other than just their immediate friend or neighbourhood group. and what could help accelerate that process? increasing the trust that women will get what they paid for, will really be critical. but, you know, even more so in order

to motivate that change. i mean, a decoders the work that we do is based on voice analysis and text analysis of lower income people to get into what they're thinking and what they appreciate. now, women in small business have consistently said that they get the biggest increase of sales from marketplaces when they can get on them. it might be that they provide the biggest push for being able to accept digital payments when they sell goods on that marketplace. of course, digitalfinance and commerce can make it easier to spend money and even gamble. have you seen a rise in people getting into difficulty? absolutely. and especially during covid, there was a tremendous increase in digital credit in many different places. but what dakotas particularly worked on was doing text analysis over twitter and google pay on digital digital credit apps in india.

and what was happening because those digital credit apps were outside the regulatory band of the reserve bank of india. there were all sorts of difficult behaviour that was happening like those companies that offered digital credit would be able to access customers, contact books, and in order to be paid back, they would start to blackmail the borrower by saying that they were going to go to their contacts and tell them how they're not paying back loans now. since then, the reserve bank of india has taken steps to bring those companies under supervision. and it's helped a great deal.

finally, daryl, and i'm asking all my guests, this, is cash dead? well, mark, i think that cash is on its way to being dead. and i think certainly in the developing world, we're increasingly wanting it to be dead. we think on the whole that digital transactions help low income people have money that's, uh, convenient and be able to make digital transactions in their own time and safely. and in many ways, it helps manage money. it doesn't always work perfectly. there's stops and starts, but that in general is where the financial inclusion industry is going. daryl collins, thanks so much for your time. it's been great having you with us. thank you so much, mark. one of the biggest players in the move for greater financial inclusion in the system is, unsurprisingly, the world bank,

which works to reduce poverty in developing countries. earlier, i got a chance to speak with the man who leads their global team on financial inclusion. harish natarajan. welcome to the show. let me start with this. three quarters of adults around the world have access to an account at a bank or regulated institution around 2021, leaving a quarter hundreds of millions of people without one. so how damaging is it not having access to a bank account and access to the financial system? no, it is quite damaging. the figures you are quoting are the global averages, of course, but if you take the developing countries, it comes down. it is 71% of adults who are covered. and it is notjust bank account, but as you said, accounted a regulated financial institution. individuals who do not have access to financial services, they are not able to smooth their consumption. they are not able to invest in, uh,

improving the human kind of capital. they're not able to seize the economic opportunities. what about seniors and neurodivergent people? digital banking isn't for everyone. how do we overcome their difficulties in a world where cash is disappearing? well, i think a lot more needs to be done to certainly to make digital banking relevant for everybody. what we are seeing happening is some kind of awareness about this issue and, and efforts to tailor the products and services to meet the needs of the aged and other customer segments who might not be able to interact in a normal way with digital financial services. uh, maybe more support for the customer service for them. um, more basic services so that the product is not complicated. and then also more control. um, on the transactions and so on, giving lower limits, for example, so that they are not abused.

how are women affected in this area? is there a gender gap on financial inclusion? there is a gender gap. um, it is it narrowed a little bit over the years. uh, currently for developing countries, it stands at 6% from the pure basic measure of, uh, access to an account. um, and then if you look at access to and usage of services in general, there's about a three percentage point difference. these are all, of course, um, uh, estimates based on, based on surveys, um, and digital financialservices, um, do help women get access to and use financialservices, uh, more easily than the traditional methods. but even there, there is a gap in terms of the usage of digital services by by men versus women. but without the digital financial services, the gains we have made in financial inclusion for women would not have been achieved. cyber attacks are becoming a more common occurrence. they're expensive for companies to police,

but there's also the media coverage, which could be putting people off putting all their eggs in a digital banking basket. is that a big challenge? it is. um, and of course, for somebody new to digital financial services, i think they are more vulnerable and more prone to fall victim to some of these scams and other attacks. so in that sense, um, it can really make people think twice before making the next use of digital financial services. so in that sense, there is certainly an impact. but of course, there are some research which shows that with adequate controls and with adequate safeguards in place, this confidence can be restored. there might be a dip in the immediate aftermath, but over a period they do become more familiar and more comfortable using digital financial services and the cost of cyber attack and all these different, um, uh, kind of forms of privacy breach

and data loss and all of that is actually quite significant. what are the positive impacts of digitalisation? the speed of payments is, uh, is dramatically improving. uh, there are 70 uh, developing countries have what is being called as fast payment systems. and this is dramatically improving the speed of payments. it is also creating new ways and new opportunities for people to move towards digital. and in a way, it is a pull factor that is also driving a lot of the financial inclusion gains we are seeing across the world. and small merchants who are not able to accept digital payments before are now able to do it because of qr code based payments, for example. so a lot of, um, uh, demand latent demand for digital payments has been opened up because of the improvements in fast payments. we are seeing also improvements in terms of the way other financial services are made available through platforms, through integrating them into,

into widely used um applications, including also on the payment applications. so this is increasing access to insurance. it is increasing access to some of the investment opportunities like mutual funds and so on. so there is a range of improvements. the most dramatic one is being seen in payments. but i think time will time will show that the improvements are going to be significant also in other areas. what else would you like to see fintech or banks do to help improve financial inclusion around the world ? the fintech industry, i think, needs to focus a lot more on consumer protection issues. in some cases, there has been very aggressive pursuit of market share, which has resulted in maybe paying less attention to the customer context. um, uh, very aggressive sales practices in some cases have led to over—indebtedness and there's also very aggressive collection practices. um, so i think those are areas to, to improve. and then also uh, perhaps

many of the fintech companies are overoptimized. so everything is through chatbots and, and such tools. and that can be a problem when there's a real issue or when there's a complex issue, uh, which might be okay during normal times. but in the case of um, particular event, it might not stand up. and also one more area where i think fintech companies also should focus, i think, is really to, um, to focus more on this gender, uh, issue, which you were talking about. i think more needs to be done to develop more tailored products and more oriented towards the needs of women. there are some movements we are seeing, but i think fintech companies can can do more. harish, it's been fascinating hearing about this global move to digitalfinance and the momentum behind it. um, do you think cash is dead? no, i don't think so. um, but in terms of i think what i think we should aspire for is the situations where you need to use cash is as low as possible. and but of course, whoever needs to,

um, wants to and wants to needs to use it. they should be able to use it until they are comfortable with digital. harish natarajan, thanks for coming on the programme. thank you. it's notjust personal money which is online. moving funds and payments for businesses around the world has never been smoother. there's massive competition out there for companies who will manage your payments. my colleague ben thompson spoke to the boss of one of them, airwallex. jack zhang, good to have you on the programme talk to me first of all about what you do. what is airwallex? we're providing banking and payment services like bank accounts globally, moving money around the world, and also the entire sort of software suite to help you run your business. you're not alone in offering services like that. it's a really competitive market. everyone wants a slice of that pie. why are you any different? we built our business as an infrastructure first business, so we built alternative infrastructure to the swift system, which is built in the 1970s.

so we're able to lower the cost by more than 90% compared to the traditional swift or correspondent banking system when you transfer money globally. and jack, a few weeks ago, much of the world's travel infrastructure, other systems, they went down in that microsoft crowdstrike outage. what impact did it have on a company like yours? so first of all, most of our laptops are not running on, um, uh, windows systems. so we use mac internally. but for our customers that interacting with our system, uh, we, um, run on google cloud. so we didn't have any issues. um, but because we are a card issuer, uh, interacting with visa, mastercard as well, um, and, uh, we did see some minor issues on the, on the scheme side. uh, so had a slightly impact to our customer, but i wouldn't say it's a huge amount of impact. and that shows the, uh, the benefit of using a technology stack that, uh, is the latest. and does an outage like that crowdstrike problem underline

the difficulty of relying on systems that are digital only? so if people are making a payment through your platform, they would worry that the payment may not get there if there is a repeat of something similar, you know, are there back up plans? what's the resilience strategy here? so we generally have um, do cloud infrastructure so that when one cloud has gone down and we have another cluster, um, you know, backup that should be running straight away. so that kind of give you the security, um, of, of like, you know, no downtime. so our, our up time is actually more than 99.99%. then we had a multi cloud infrastructure. so that say when google cloud went down, then we had a backup cloud sitting on other cloud services that can potentially help our customer and continue to run, um, their business. is every country developing at the same pace when it comes to this adoption of tech in the financial sphere?

and i wonder, you know, if you look at large parts of africa, they utterly bypassed credit cards and plastic cards altogether and went straight to digital payments. if you go to china, digital payments really do rule. and i wonder where in the world has adopted and fallen in love with digital payments more than others? i think there's some countries have really done well, um, on the sort of real time payment system, for example, uk launched fast payment a long time ago, and that's running 24 by seven. uh, australia, for example, launched mpp, which is a real time payment system, a couple of years ago. uh, still people gradually adopting it. uh, but countries like india have, um, upi and, uh, brazil have and those systems have really penetrated more than 90% of the population very quickly, which is much cheaper and real time. and these sort of domestic innovation, unfortunately, hadn't been leveraged by the traditional swift system.

well, airwallex have done is able to connecting these real time domestic payment system to a global cloud. so any people around the world, any businesses wanted to transact globally can leveraging this latest innovation and digital payments innovation and all various market around the world. we also know, of course as innovation improves, so too do the criminals, the fraudsters that want a piece of that action too. and we've also seen things like payment systems used for international diplomacy. i'm thinking of russia, for example, locked out of that swift system. given what's going on in ukraine. what difficulties does that pose for you as a business? trying to comply with international rules and sanctions and also keeping an eye on the fraudsters? i think the aml sanction is, uh, is a lot easier than the fraud. um, so from a sanction point of view, it's quite easy for us to block transaction coming out of russia or making payments to russia. uh, and we even deploy.... and is that. just a blanket ban, you say?

much in from a like a russia point of view that, uh, we not making or taking any payments, uh, in and out of russia. uh, and there's some more complexity around the baltic area because there's some people trying to get around the rules by setting up shell entities in the baltic area. and, you know, we have more complicated rules around that. um, so in general, like the, the rules in, in sanction and aml are sort of black and white, uh, where come to fraud is a lot more tricky, especially with the takeoff of ai. uh, i think it'sjust going to getting even more difficult, uh, to, to prevent. and we spent, you know, in airwallex, we have over 100 engineers working on our fraud and aml system and kyc system. so that kind of give you an idea of how much of a, um, a resource we deploy, uh, to, to protecting our customers through this, uh, from this, uh, fraud incidents. and i suppose the final question is this the end of cash? is cash dead? i do feel, uh, cash will gradually disappearing, uh, in the next decade. in the next decade. so that's not long. well, i mean, depends on the market. i think in some of the, um,

you know, markets in africa, maybe some of the, the smaller, underdeveloped countries that still be cash around. but in terms of like the major digital economy, uh, i don't see, um, you know, why people will continue to use cash, especially as more and more fintech started to innovating in that different sort of areas of the financial services and, and everything kind of moving to, to digital. so i believe that, uh, cash will gradually disappearing. jake zhang, co—founder and chief executive of airwallex. it's good to have you on the programme this week. thank you. thanks, ben. ben thompson there, speaking with jack zhang of airwallex. well, that's it for this week. i hope you enjoyed the show. don't forget, you can keep up with the latest on our global economy on the bbc website or the smartphone app. you can also follow me on x i'm at mark lobel. thank you for watching. i'll see you soon. bye bye. hello there. more sunshine expected as we head through the weekend, especially tomorrow, right across the uk. there will be a brief spike in heat and humidity,

particularly for southern and eastern areas of england. it will be only brief because we will see fresher feeling conditions with some outbreaks of rain by the time we get to tuesday. we're not quite there yet with the heat either today. there is a lot of cloud from this weather front towards the south of england and across wales, some patches of rain towards the west at times. still a slice of sunshine across the far south and the east. a lot of this cloud will tend to break up through the afternoon. the best of the sunshine will be across northern ireland, parts of northern england, where it should stay largely dry. a scattering of showers for north—west scotland. here it is cooler and still breezy, but elsewhere the winds are lighter than they were yesterday. highs of 16 to 25 celsius. tonight, well, it will still feel rather muggy, but a cooler night towards the north and the west with clear spells developing. a bit of mist and low cloud perhaps into tomorrow morning and the risk of some sea fog towards the south coast. across the south, again, lows of around 13 to 16 degrees. high pressure dominates as we head through sunday.

we're drawing in more of a south—easterly wind and that's going to allow the temperatures to build for many of us. the sea fog could lap onshore at times, but it should all be gone, even out towards the south—west, as we head through the afternoon. some areas of cloud at times, but a lot of sunshine too. the sunshine, of course, will help the temperatures to rise, so a warmer looking day across the board. 16 to 23 celsius in scotland, but maybe the high 20s now in the far south—east of england. on monday we're likely to see the peak of the heat towards the south and the east, but some heavy, thundery showers further north and west, just gradually tracking their way further eastwards. temperature—wise, we could get as high as perhaps 32 or even 33 degrees celsius somewhere across southern or eastern areas of england, making it the warmest day of the year so far if we do get to 33 degrees. atlantic fronts, though, pushing in from the west on tuesday will bring some fresher feeling conditions. still the high 20s in south—east england, but much cooler than that further north and west.

there will be some outbreaks of rain gradually pushing eastwards. that sets the tone, really, for the rest of the week — cooler and quite unsettled at times. bye— bye. live from london, this is bbc news. israel strikes a school building sheltering displaced palestinians in gaza city, killing dozens. israel says the school contained a hamas command centre. king charles calls for unity after violent unrest in the uk over the past two weeks. russia is trying for a fifth day to repel a massive cross—border incursion by ukraine.

tight security measures are now in force. gold for ethiopia's tamirat tola as he wins the men's marathon on the final weekend of the paris olympics. team usa face france in the blockbuster men's basketball final shortly. hello, i'm nicky schiller. we start this hour with the latest on the israel—hamas war. dozens of palestinians are reported to have been killed in an israeli air strike on a school housing displaced families in gaza city — with the hamas—run gaza government saying 11 children are among 93 people killed. these are some of the latest images from the scene — many are too graphic for us to show. the israeli military says around 20 hamas and islamichhad militants were operating from the building.