It's great to be part of this year's Cybos Conference, which is being hosted in London for the very first time. Now London's long been the heart of the global financial system, and it's now also one of the world's leading FinTech hubs. And I know you're going to spend most of your time rightly discussing private innovation, but I want to take this short opportunity to set out the Bank of England's ambitious plan to support your efforts to create the future of finance. As this conference recognizes, the world's becoming increasingly digitized and hyper-connected, and that's bringing enormous new opportunities, and along with it, some challenges. This new economy requires a new finance. A new finance to serve the digital economy. A new finance that balances innovation with resilience. And that new finance requires a new Bank of England, one which will enable innovation and empower competition, all well-insuring, the resilience of the financial system. So let me take a few moments to expand. First, to enable the digital economy, the very nature of commerce is changing. Last year, one-fifth of all sales in the UK were online. Next year, it'll be one quarter. Use of cash has declined from two-thirds of all payments a decade ago to only one quarter today. This new economy is placing new demands on the financial system. Consumers and businesses increasingly expect transactions to be settled in real time, and payments across borders to be indistinguishable from those across the street. And to help private innovation meet these demands, the Bank is leveling the playing field between old and new. As you may know, until recently, only commercial banks had direct access to the core of the payment system, RTGS. And that made sense in an old world arranged around a series of hubs and spokes, but it's increasingly an agronistic in the new distributed finance that's emerging. So now we at the Bank are making it easier for a broader set of firms to plug in and compete with banks, where the first G20 central bank to do so. Already, five payment service providers are members of RTGS, and there's a pipeline of another 20 firms looking to join. According to demands from innovators, RTGS will now also provide API access to users to read and write payments data, as well as implementing a system whereby each payment will be tagged with information in a standardized format across the world, speeding up settlement and facilitating KYC, AML, and CFT requirements. The Bank is also using the opportunity of the RTGS rebuild to support more competitive platform-based finance of SMEs, and in doing so to contribute to closing the biggest funding gap in this country. SMEs are the engine room of our economy, but almost half of them don't plan to use external finance, citing the hassle or the time associated with applying from banks. Of those that have approached their bank, almost two-fifths have been rejected. And part of the problem is that the assets the SMEs are seeking to borrow against are increasingly intangible, such as the value of a brand or a user base, rather than traditional physical assets like buildings or machinery. And SMEs that haven't borrowed, of course, lack the track record required for a traditional credit scoring. But this shouldn't be the case in a data-rich world. To close the SME funding gap, SMEs must be able to identify all the data relevant to their businesses, incorporate it into their individual credit files, and easily share those files with all potential providers of finance. And that's why the Bank of England is laying some of the groundwork for a new open platform for SME lending in the UK. The platform would turbocharge open banking and empower SMEs, and it would enhance competition for SME lending, making access to finance quick, easy, and cost-effective. The Bank of England is also consulting on opening access to our own balance sheet to new payment providers. From our perspective, expanding access can improve the transmission of monetary policy, it can increase competition, and done correctly it can support financial stability. From the perspective of UK households and businesses, wider access can improve services, cut costs and speed delivery. Now the potential for transformation in retail payments is enormous, you know that. I'll give one example, stablecoins, they seek to offer digital payment via instruments which retain a reliable value. If designed and regulated appropriately, stablecoins have the potential to substantially improve financial inclusion and to dramatically lower the costs of domestic and cross-border payments. The Bank of England approaches such innovations as stablecoins and other payment innovations with an open mind, but not an open door. Re-recognize that technology is trying to solve problems for consumers, but we want to make sure that in solving one problem, they don't inadvertently create other more systemic ones. And unlike social media, for which standards and regulations are being debated well after they've been adopted by billions of users, the terms of engagement for such payment innovations must be adopted in advance of any launch, which is why we want to engage early on with innovators to help you compete while keeping a system safe. Systemically important payment systems will have to meet the highest standards of potential regulation and consumer protection, and they will have to address issues ranging from any money laundering to data protection to operational resilience. Using our position at the very heart of the international financial system, Bank of England is helping to lead the way on these issues through forests such as the G7, the FSB, and the BIS. Now let me turn to strengthening the system in the face of new risks. Today the key competitive advantage in financial services is how firms and their supervisors collect, store, and analyze the explosion of data. Using general purpose technologies like the cloud and AI could herald leaner, faster, and more tailored financial services. A quarter of major banks' activities and almost one-third of all UK payments' activities are already hosted on the cloud, and banking is already the second biggest global spender on AI systems. These savings can be passed onto customers, and if properly managed, they can improve the overall resilience of the system. For these reasons, the Bank of England is very open to greater adoption of the cloud and usage of AI. To ensure the benefits of cloud computing are realized, and that the associated risks are well managed, the banks are going to issue a supervisory statement in the autumn that sets out our new approach. The PRA is also exploring how new technologies could streamline firms' compliance and regulatory processes, while improving our own ability to analyze relevant data. Let's put it in perspective. The Bank of England now receives 65 billion data points each year of firm-related information, reviewing it all would be the equivalent of each supervisor reading the complete works of Shakespeare twice a week every week of the year. For firms, while the cloud and AI have reduced the cost of storage and analysis, producing regulatory submissions is still labor intensive, and the cost to the industry could range between two and four and a half billion pounds every year. We see opportunities for much more efficient processes at every stage of supervision. That includes simplifying our rules, considering models whereby we pull data from firms, and employing machine learning and AI to analyze the data. Last month, the bank launched a review on how we host and use regulatory data, and will embark on proofs of concept with firms to test how we can automatically extract regulatory data and use AI and ML to analyze it. This is a rich area for FinTech innovation, and we welcome the chance to work with those of you who are interested. Let me conclude. The new finance has the potential to unlock stronger, more sustainable, and more inclusive growth. By taking some of the measures like those that I've outlined today, the Bank of England can help enable that new economy, empower greater competition, and ensure the resilience of the financial system at the same time. But to be as effective as possible, we need and we want to engage with you. In this conference, you'll be seeing more of us on SyBoss TV, not more of me, thankfully for you. Bank of England colleagues will be participating in a number of panels, and we'll be hosting a number of teachings during the day to give you an opportunity to ask questions about our plans. My colleagues and I look forward to speaking with you, to learning from you, and we hope that you can help us realize these ambitions to improve finance for everyone. After all, we all remember that finance is not an end to itself. Finance is a servant of households and entrepreneurs that make this country great, and they are demanding more sustainable and inclusive and a more prosperous future. The ultimate test of new finance is whether we can design it and put it into place in a way that helps deliver just that. Thank you very much. Enjoy the conference.