Amongst those considerations was what additional functionality the renewed RTGS service 2  KPMG, Value of Fintech, https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/uk/pdf/2017/10/value-of-fintech.pdf  4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  4  would need to provide in order to enable platforms using innovative technology to optimise their access to central bank money settlement. 3  The results of the POC were published on the Bank of England’s website in June this year. The results were encouraging and demonstrated that participants using alternative technology, such as DLT, could connect and settle. If used in this way, it could enable a wider range of institutions and infrastructures to access prefunded settlement, supporting competition and innovation, offering efficiency gains for users preparing RTGS for future demand. Another area of research is synchronisation – sometimes known as ‘atomic settlement’. This would provide the ability to link payments (or other asset movements) so that each individual movement would happen if and, only if, they all do. Initial industry feedback suggested that for certain transaction types (such as housing transactions, corporate transactions, securities settlement and cross-border payments), synchronisation might reduce cost and risk, improve efficiency, and support innovative new methods of settlement. We 4  recently published a Call for Interest on synchronisation; the deadline for which is 28 September. ISO 20022  None of our ambitions; be they higher resilience, broader access, wider interoperability, improved user functionality, or stronger end-to-end risk management, would be possible without a messaging standard in place.

As a result of this, Turkish banks have started to provide interactive banking services to decrease their costs and increase efficiency of banking transactions. They are also part of the Electronic Fund Transfer system for their internal banking transactions and of S.W.I.F.T. for external transactions. Parallel to the process of liberalizing the economy, Turkish banks have made significant progress in investments and in organizations abroad. They opened branches abroad and took important steps to increase their shares in international markets by acquiring financial participations and partnerships. As of June 2000, Turkish banking sector, including branches abroad, operates with the total asset size of USD 140.4 billion, more than 8,000 branches and almost 170,000 personnel. The Turkish banking sector is also open to international competition. At present 25 foreign banks, including development and investment banks, constitute 31% of the total number of banks in the sector. The share of foreign banks has also increased during the past few years. While their share was 5.8% and 5.6% as the end of 1997 and 1998 respectively, it increased to 6.7% as of June 2000, representing the total asset size of USD 9.4 billion. The majority of this share belongs to foreign commercial banks. As of July 2000, Turkish banks have: •  83 financial subsidiaries in 24 different countries;  •  41 branches in 10 different countries; and  •  62 foreign representative offices in 10 countries.