digital telecoms [ telecommunications ] divide, and that has to be addressed. [ with ] what we are doing now, satellite services will no longer be needed to be part of telecoms franchises. some areas are underserved. any entrepreneur would come up and put up a vsat [ very small aperture terminal ] so that they can increase access to the internet in those places that are underserved. the birth of the bsp's consumer protection and market conduct office ( cpmco ) in addition, we are creating an enabling regulatory environment, and consumer protection is one of them. 2 / 4 bis - central bankers'speeches fortunately, we were able to pass a law that literally turned an office [ the cpmco ] in the central bank into a court - the decisions of which can be challenged only at the court of appeals, just one level below the supreme court. of course, because of these powers, it [ the office ] can force very fast mediation, but we hope we never get there, [ to the point ] where somebody from the central bank acts like a judge and makes a ruling, whether who is at fault and the extent to which the consumer indicates the bank is wrong. we also have a chatbot where we can deal with consumer concerns in real - time via a web chat on the bsp website, via messenger or facebook, and via sms [ short message service ] or text. strengthening digital financial literacy of course, we have programs that are trying to improve financial literacy. my own experience with it is, sometimes, financial literacy problems are also arithmetic problems. sometimes, some people could not solve very simple arithmetic problems, like computing interest. so, i suppose, a big part of financial literacy has to start from grade school. boosting responsible innovation we are also into using a framework of digital banks, where digital banks are not allowed to have more than one branch so they will be forced to be really digital. we opened up six [ digital banks ]. the reason we capped it at six is that we are actually quite afraid that if there are too many, some of them might actually fall by the wayside, and consumers may lose their trust [ in the financial system ], and our ability to regulate them may actually be reduced. finally, we are also moving toward an open finance framework. that might take some time, but the entire point is that the consumer owns the data, and it is up to him whether somebody could see it or not

ways of reaching them. e - money [ electronic money ] has played a big role [ in onboarding filipinos to the formal financial system ]. e - money accounts grew to 36 percent in 2021 [ from 8. 0 percent in 2019 ], much higher now. promoting strong consumer protection mechanisms 1 / 4 bis - central bankers'speeches in the aspect of consumer protection and fraud, fortunately, we were finally able to pass a law that requires every prepaid sim [ subscriber identity module ] card to have a verified id [ identification ]. by the way, i tried it myself. i bought a sim card, uploaded my id, which was a national id, and took a selfie. it took them only three days to send me a text [ message ] saying, " you have been verified. " maybe they found out that i was the central bank governor ; that is why they were fast. i do not know, but i do not think so. then, i opened [ an ewallet account ] - i will not say what kind, whether it is gcash or it is maya - and was able to do so very quickly. by the way, i am also the chairman of the anti - money laundering council, and what we found was that before we did this - making sure that every sim card has a unique identity of the individual with the right name, with the retina, and the fingerprint - we actually found out that there was one person owning 1, 000 sim cards [ that was ] actually operating illegal gambling. finally, because of all these problems, congress moved and said, " from now on, no verification of identity, your sim card will expire in two months. " so, it is working. since the number of people who use their mobile phones [ for digital payments ] has increased significantly, that is why we are actually quite confident that we will be able to succeed if we can improve the physical infrastructure - maybe we can even bring it [ the proportion of filipino adults that are financially excluded ] below 30 percent. taking a whole - of - government approach to financial inclusion from the point of view of government, it [ financial inclusion ] is a whole - of - government approach. the national strategy for financial inclusion is not just the central bank's [ initiative ] ; it is the [ initiative of the ] entire government. addressing the infrastructure problem as i already alluded to, there are issues, of course. you have the