Mario Marcel: FinTech and the future of central banking - a Latin American perspective

Keynote speech by Mr Mario Marcel, Governor of the Central Bank of Chile, at the Annual Conference of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 29 June 2017.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Central bank speech  | 
31 July 2017

Ladies and gentlemen,

Let me first thank the organizers for inviting me to participate in this Conference. This gives me the opportunity to link my present job as Governor of the Central Bank of Chile, with my past, as a student of Economics at Cambridge, nearly 30 years ago.

At that time, the Judge Business School was still in the making, but I am glad to see how it has grown to become a world leader in business education. The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, housed at JBS, is a good example of how a centuries-old university can undertake vibrant, emerging subjects and use good intellectual discipline to tackle them.

I attend this meeting not as somebody that is "navigating the contours", but as a head of a quintessential mainstream economic institution-a Central Bank. In the past few days I attended the BIS Annual General Meeting of Governors and the ECB Forum on Central Banking, so it is good to switch to a more distended environment. Yet I am not the only one coming from that different world, since FSB representatives are also here alongside Juan Ketterer of the Inter-American Development Bank, with whom I was lucky to work a few years ago.