Fabio Panetta: Stay safe at the intersection: the confluence of big techs and global stablecoins

Speech by Mr Fabio Panetta, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, at the panel on "Cross-border dimensions of non-bank financial intermediation: what are the priorities for building resilience globally?", as part of the UK G7 Presidency Conference on "Safe Openness in Global Trade and Finance", hosted by the Bank of England, 8 October 2021.

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

In the years since the global financial crisis, non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs) have shown continuous growth, and now account for more than half of global financial assets.

Although there are a variety of reasons for this development, one of the factors has been the stricter banking regulation adopted after the global financial crisis constraining the risk-taking of banks. The regulatory reforms of the last decade have promoted financial stability, especially in the banking sector. At the same time, these reforms have been accompanied by an expansion of actors outside the regulatory perimeter.

NBFIs have grown faster than banks over much of the past decade: in the euro area, their assets have almost doubled, reaching €48 trillion in December 2020 (Chart 1). In the same period, non-bank finance has become an important source of funding for the real economy: its share of credit to non-financial corporations has increased from about 15% to 30% (Chart 2).