Introduction
Good morning everyone,
It is a great pleasure to be with you today, and I would like to warmly thank the South African Reserve Bank for its invitation and for organising this conference.
The theme of this session, “Payments in a fragmenting world: sovereignty, strategy and system design”, is particularly timely. A number of drivers are currently at play to transform our payments and market infrastructures both domestically and internationally, ranging from geopolitical development to technological innovation and including structural transformation in demand for and supply of clearing and settlement services. They could weight both negatively and positively on their efficiency and safety. An important determinant in my view of the actual impact of those drivers for change will depend on the evolution of central banks policies. This is certainly the case in the euro area, and in France in particular, where the Banque de France has been explicitly mandated to ensure the safety and efficiency of clearing and settlement systems, and the safety of payments instruments.
The scale and form this adaptation of central bank policies may take vary from one jurisdiction to another depending on locaI circumstances and policy priorities. In the euro-area in general and in France in particular an important point of attention currently is the impact of technological innovations, and in particular the spread of DLT-based infrastructures in support of the development of tokenised financial markets. Therefore, I would like to focus my remarks today on the implications of this transformation for our policy stance and actions.
To put it simply we believe that this transformation requires from us in the wholesale payments and market infrastructure space, to adapt the implementation modalities of our policies but not to change their substance, in particular as providers of central bank money services and of critical market infrastructures, to ensure that the expansion of tokenisation bring its expected efficiency benefits without weighting negatively on monetary and financial stability and our strategic control over the functioning and evolution of the euro’s payment and settlement infrastructure.