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 cawley 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 were jumping 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, manage their money. she's an academic and co—founder of decodis, 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, i think 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, in the rural areas. 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 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 thanjust their immediate friend or neighbourhood group. what could help accelerate that process? what could help accelerate that rocess? ., ,., ., process? even more so, in order to motivate _ process? even more so, in order to motivate that _ process? even more so, in order to motivate that change, - process? even more so, in order to motivate that change, the - to motivate that change, the work that we do is based on voice analysis and text analysis of lower economic people to get into what they are thinking and appreciate. women and small business have consistently said that they get, the biggest increase of sales from marketplaces when they can get on them. it may 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 decodis particularly worked on was doing text analysis over twitter and google pay, on 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, 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 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, account at 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 improving the human kind of capital. they are 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 certainly to make digital banking relevant for everybody. what we are seeing happening is some kind of awareness about this issue 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. maybe more support for the customer service for them, more basic services so that the product is not complicated and then also more control 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, there is a gender gap. it narrowed a little bit over the years. currently, for developing countries, it stands at 6% from the pure basic measure of access to an account. and then if you look at access to and usage of services in general, there's about a 3% difference. these are all, of course, estimates based on surveys. and digital financial services do help women get access

to and use financial services more easily than the traditional methods. but even there, there is a gap in terms of the usage of digital services 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? no, it is, um... ..and, of course, for somebody new to digitalfinancial 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, 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. what are the positive impacts of digitalisation? the speed of payments is dramatically improving. there are 70 developing countries have what is being called as fast—payment systems, and this is dramatically improving the speed of payments. there are 70 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 were 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 latent demand for digital payments has been opened up because of the improvements in fast payments. also improvements in terms of the other financial services are made available to platforms to integrate them into widely used applications including the payment applications this is increasing access to some of the investment opportunities like mutual funds so there's a range of improvements, the most dramatic ones being payments but in time i'm sure the improvements will be significant 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. very aggressive sales practices in some cases have led to overindebtedness, and there's also very aggressive collection practices. so i think those are areas to improve, and then also perhaps many of the fintech companies are overoptimised, so everything is through chatbots and such tools, and that can be a problem when there's a real issue or when there's a complex issue, which might be ok during normal times, but in the case of a 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 focus more on this gender 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 do more. harish, it's been fascinating hearing about this global move to digitalfinance and the momentum behind it. do you think cash is dead? no, i don't think so, 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. but, of course, whoever wants to and needs to use it, they should be able to use it until they are comfortable with digital. harish natarajan, thanks very much for coming on the programme. thank you. it's not just personal it's notjust personal money on lines moving funds for businesses around the world has never been smoother, with massive competition for companies that will manage payments. my colleague ben thompson spoke to the one of them. talk to me first all

about what you do. we are providing _ about what you do. we are providing banking - about what you do. we are providing banking and - about what you do. we are - providing banking and payment services like bank accounts globally moving money around the world and also the entire software to help you run your business. software to help you run your business-_ business. you're not alone in offerin: business. you're not alone in offering services _ business. you're not alone in offering services like - business. you're not alone in offering services like that - offering services like that everyone wants a slice of that pie. are you any different? element we build our infrastructure to make business as an infrastructure first business we are able to lower the costs by more than 90% compared to traditional banking systems when you transfer money globally. a few weeks ago much of the world travel infrastructure of the systems went down and that microsoft crowd strict outage, what impact did have on a company like yoursmost of our laptops are not running on the window systems we use mac internally but for our customers

so, first of all, most of our laptops are not running on windows systems, so we use mac internally. but for our customers that are interacting with our system, we run on google cloud, so we didn't have any issues. but because we are a card issuer, interacting with visa, mastercard as well, we did see some minor issues on the scheme side, so had a slight impact to our customers, but i wouldn't say it's a huge amount of impact. and that shows the benefit of using a technology stack that 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 backup plans? what's the resilience strategy here? so we generally have two cloud infrastructure, so that when one cloud have gone down, then we have another cluster, you know, a backup that should be running straight away. so that kind of give you the security of, like, you know, no downtime. so our uptime is actually

more than 99.99%. 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 continue to run 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 on the sort of real—time payment system. for example, uk launched faster payment a long time ago, and that's running 21w. australia, for example, launched npp, which is a real—time payment system, a couple of years ago. still people gradually adopting it.

but countries like india have upi, and brazil have pix, 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 innovations, unfortunately haven't been leveraged by the traditional swift system. what airwallex have done is able to connecting these real—time domestic payment systems to a global cloud, so any people around the world, any businesses wanting to transact globally, can leverage this latest innovation in digital payments innovation in all various markets 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 a lot easier than the fraud. so from a sanction point

of view, it's quite easy for us to block transactions coming out of russia or making payments to russia, and we even deploy some... and is thatjust a blanket ban, you say, "we will not do that"? pretty much from, like, a russia point of view. we're not making or taking any payments in and out of russia. and there's some more complexity around the baltic area, cos 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. so in general, like, the rules in sanction and aml are pretty sort of black and white, where come to fraud, it's a lot more tricky, especially with the take—off of ai. i think it's just going to get even more difficult to prevent, and we spent... you know, in airwallex, we have over 100 engineers working on ourfraud and aml system and kyc systems, so that kind of gives you an idea of how much of a resource we deploy to protecting our customers from these fraud incidents.

and i suppose the final question, is this the end of cash? is cash dead? i do feel cash will gradually disappearing in the next decade. in the next decade, so that's not long. well, i mean, it depends on the market. i think in some of the, you know, markets in africa, maybe some of the smaller, underdeveloped countries there still will be cash around. but in terms of, like, the major digital economies, i don't see, you know, why people will continue to use cash, especially as more and more fintechs start to innovate in different sort of areas of the financial services and everything kind of moving to digital in that sense. so i believe that cash will gradually disappear. jack 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. thank you for watching. i'll see you soon. bye— bye. hello. sunday promises to be a sunny day across many parts of the uk and turning really quite hot across the south of the country. the outlook into monday points to even hotter weather and the possibility of some big showers and thunderstorms in the north—west of the uk. so here's the morning, then, on sunday. admittedly, it will be a little cloudy to start with in the south, perhaps some mist and murk and coastal fog, particularly in the south—west. a bit of drizzle too, but the rest of the uk, it's sunshine all round, right from the word go. now, we may have to wait a little bit across the south before that sun breaks through, but i think come the afternoon, it really will be that strong sunshine beating down

on us nationwide. so how hot is it going to get on sunday? well, typically in the mid to high 20s across wales and england, but one or two spots could reach 30 in the south. more comfortable across northern ireland and scotland — low 20s here, but of course gloriously sunny. and then there will be some changes on the way come monday. a cold front is going to sweep off the atlantic. behind it, we've got cooler air. ahead of this weather front, hot air is spreading in from the south. look how hot it's going to be on monday across the north of france — high 30s. and that hot air is going to clip the uk. so let's see what's happening, then, early on monday. we've got cool air spreading in off the atlantic, that very hot air spreading out of france. where it clashes, we'll see storms breaking out here in the north—west of the uk. very difficult to pinpoint where they're going to be, but they will be spreading towards the north—west. and the temperatures, around 20 or so in the north—west,

but widely into the 30s across england and possibly the mid 30s around london and the south—east. so a very hot day to come for some of us on monday, and the humidity will increase as well. it really will feel quite uncomfortable. now, tuesday, these weather fronts and low pressures basically win. they sweep across the uk, and all of that heat will be pushed towards more central and eastern parts of europe. now, there will be still some warmth left, i think, across eastern parts of the uk on tuesday — possibly the high 20s, 27, 28 celsius. but look at the values here, already dropping into the low 20s across wales and parts of western england.

live from washington, this is bbc news. israel strikes a school building sheltering displaced palestinians in gaza city, killing at least 70 people. russia says more than 76,000 people have been evacuated from the kursk region following ukraine's surprise incursion. my mother did not order

attacks on students... and we speak to the son of former bangladesh pm sheikh hasina, who says his mother would be willing to face trial if she returns to bangladesh. hello, i'm rajini vaidyanathan. welcome to this hour. an israeli air strike on a school building has killed more than 70 people. the director of the hospital has told the bbc. children among those killed have been confirmed. 0ur correspondentjenny hill sent us this report. and a warning to our viewers — it contains distressing content. anguish, bewilderment. israel struck before dawn, shattering the sanctity of morning prayer.

thousands of displaced civilians were sheltering here,