Cecilia Skingsley: Building payment systems for our grandchildren

Digital speech by Ms Cecilia Skingsley, Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at a webinar organised by Swedbank, 6 October 2021.

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

Accompanying slides: https://www.bis.org/review/r211021f_slides.pdf 

I would like to thank Anders Mölgaard Pedersen and André Reslow for their help with writing this speech, and Ann Börestam, Gabriela Guibourg, Eva Hellström, Elizabeth Nilsson, Tommy Persson, Björn Segendorff, Marianne Sterner, Johanna Stenkula von Rosen and Gary Watson for valuable comments.

Payments at the heart of our everyday lives

Firstly, thanks for inviting me this morning to speak about payments and the infrastructure that makes them possible.1 A topic that currently commands quite a lot of time at both the Swedish banks and the Riksbank, due to large projects aimed at basically building the future payment systems. I will say more about this shortly.

Many of us tend to pay without thinking so much about what actually happens. On a typical day, a first interaction with the payment system could be preloading your public transport card from your bank account. At work, you use your mobile phone to send – or 'swish' as we call it after the domestic mobile payment service – a contribution to a colleagues 50th birthday present. Later, lunch is paid for with a bank card that you may also use to buy groceries with on your way home.

Back from work, you may still have a few payments to make. In the evening, perhaps you log on to your internet bank to pay a couple of bills. Also, if the month has not been too costly, a sum of money may be placed in your savings account or even invested in the stock market. Then, maybe you round off the day by some visits to your favourite online shops paying by choosing among the methods on offer.