Victoria Cleland: Enhancing resilience in payments

Speech by Ms Victoria Cleland, Executive Director for Banking, Payments and Innovation of the Bank of England, at PayExpo, London, 8 October 2019.

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

Central bank speech  | 
08 October 2019

It is a pleasure to be speaking at PayExpo at the Business Design Centre in Islington today, in an agenda packed with innovation and technological advance. I lived in Islington when I first moved to London, which had the great benefit of enabling me to walk to work. I now live further afield, but I am able to make the journey in similar time benefitting from advancements in new(er) technology - a bicycle!

It is also a pleasure to be speaking at a second major payments event in London in a month, following hot on the heels of SIBOS in late September. This demonstrates the importance of London, and the UK, as a hub for payment innovation and fintech more widely. In the second quarter of 2019 funding for fintech companies topped $8.3bn, growing 24% quarter-on-quarter - just one sign of a thriving industry. The number of payments made in the UK continues to increase too and reached a record 39 billion in 2018, with a value of more than £90 trillion. We are also experiencing a period of rapid change in the way payments are being made (one can even hire an electric bike using an app) by consumers and businesses, and in the companies and technologies behind them.