You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hume. What does it mean to be unbanked? Well, for the vast majority of people who fall in this status, it means that for financial purposes, you don't exist. Many people are trying to change this to make sure folks have access to more than just cash money, but electronic banking.

In this conversation with Ted Curran Affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rogers, MasterCard CEO A.J. Banga talks financial inclusion and how this idea can improve lives and make the world more equitable.

Well, AJ. Banga, thank you so much for being with us today.

I feel like this conversation is especially meaningful as we're waiting through this

pandemic.

It's late 2020.

And we've sort of seen the way that, you know,

inequalities have presented themselves throughout this year through this crisis.

And, you know, since you've been at the helm of MasterCard, you have championed this idea

of financial inclusion.

And so could you start, I guess, by telling us a little bit about financial inclusion.

What is it?

And why do you think this is something that can change people's lives?

Yes.

Look, I think that the COVID-19 crisis has actually made things worse in some ways.

And some of the advances that were being made over the prior decade on fighting poverty and

fighting exclusion have probably got set back a little bit, just by the nature of the manner

in which the virus has impacted minorities and disadvantaged people more than they have others,

including, by the way, minority-owned businesses, a number of whom have had disproportionate impact through the crisis.

But I guess if you pull back from the crisis,

because financial inclusion or exclusion is an underlying social problem

that dates back to well before this.

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