samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Just in the last few years, global MNCs have set up more than 30 FinTech innovation labs or research centres in Singapore. The FinTech start-up space has become a lot more vibrant. More than 400 FinTech enterprises have set up base in Singapore. We have start-ups experimenting with new ways to pay, save, invest, buy insurance, and plan for retirement. No innovation ecosystem is complete without physical spaces to facilitate experimentation and collaboration. Last year, we saw the launch of LATTICE80, Singapore’s first FinTech innovation village, occupying two whole floors of 80 Robinson Road. Well, the entire building at 80 Robinson Road will now become a FinTech innovation hub. It will be named 80RR – that’s 100,000 square feet dedicated to housing FinTechs, right in the heart of the financial district! Open Architecture A Smart Nation needs an “open API economy.” APIs are the “connectors” that allow systems to talk to one another, enabling service providers to harness information from multiple sources and produce holistic solutions for customers. MAS has been encouraging financial institutions to develop and share their APIs openly, so that they can work with other service providers to give customers a richer and more seamless experience. We started the ball rolling last year. With the Finance-as-a-Service API Playbook, banks have a common guide to identify and develop APIs. And with the Financial Industry API Register, FinTech start-ups have a one-stop shop to explore the open APIs that have been made available.

Because different banks were acquiring the same merchant so that they could offer the merchant lower on-us rates for their cards dipped in their own terminals. This was good for merchants, and even for the consumer as the merchants passed on some discounts to them. But there were hidden costs: Cashiers had to be trained on different terminals, customers at self-checkout lanes fumbled with which terminal to dip their card into. So we set out to study the market, see which merchants had more than one POS terminal, prioritise them by the volume and value of transactions that they handled, and worked closely with their acquirers one-by-one to on-board onto a single terminal that can accept all schemes that use chip and contactless near-field communication (NFC). Today, the process is still underway, but you can already see these UPOS terminals deployed in supermarkets, convenience stores and petrol stations – these are merchants that we visit daily, if not weekly. Besides addressing the challenges I mentioned above, this has certainly made the self check-out experience a delight. 17. Second, Singapore Quick Response (SGQR) code. Besides chip and contactless NFC payments, many mobile payments are optical via a Quick Response (QR) code. Just as we started to tidy up the POS terminals at merchants, we started to observe a proliferation of payment QR codes as each e-payment company deployed its own QR code sticker at each merchant’s cashier. We identified the problem early and immediately formed an industry task force comprising payment schemes and acquirers.
21  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  21  Chart 15: Trade-off that emerged after the referendum has diminished  UK households, businesses and financial markets have reacted at different speeds and to varying degrees to the prospects for the UK’s departure from the EU. In general, some of the disinflationary shock to demand has been deferred, not least because the UK has not yet left the EU, while most of the inflationary channels have begun to appear. Financial markets, particularly sterling, marked down the UK’s relative prospects quickly and sharply. The sterling ERI has depreciated by around 20% since the Brexit process became a possibility. UK focused equities have underperformed global advanced economy equities by around 30pp since the Referendum (in common currency terms) and UK long-run real yields are down by 60bp compared to those for the US. Households looked through Brexit-related uncertainties initially. But more recently, as the consequences of sterling’s fall have shown up in the shops and squeezed their real incomes, they have cut back on spending, slowing the economy. Businesses have been somewhere in between. Since the referendum, they have invested much less aggressively than usual in response to an otherwise very favourable environment (strong external environment, low cost of capital, favourable rates of profitability and limited spare capacity).

The UK has begun the process of redefining its relationship with its largest trade and investment partner. To be clear, the intention is not to turn inwards but rather to increase openness over time. In particular, the UK government’s objective is a “comprehensive, bold and ambitious free trade agreement with the European Union.” Leaving the EU is intended to enhance the UK’s ability to strike trade and investment agreements with a wide range of countries beyond those covered by virtue of its membership of the EU. But Brexit is an example of reculer pour mieux sauter. 44  That’s because any reduction in openness with the  EU is unlikely to be immediately compensated by new ties of a similar magnitude with other trade partners. And even if new agreements with other partners could be struck instantaneously, the reorientation of business relationships will take some time. This makes Brexit, relative to the experience of the past half century, unique. It will be, at least for a period of time, an example of de-globalisation not globalisation. It will proceed rapidly not slowly. Its effects will not build by stealth but can be anticipated. Let me turn to those effects. The first is the obvious disinflationary impact of Brexit given that the EU takes 44% of UK exports.
None are perfect but all are independent of the internal model, and therefore can help provide us with a different view on the evolution of risk exposures and a safeguard against model drift. All risk measures have their limitations. So we plan to use a range of measures alongside other supervisory review process initiatives, such as the analysis of internal model outputs. Conclusion In conclusion, given today’s audience, I want to stress the critical professional role of actuaries in current soft market conditions, where there may be a greater tension between on the one hand underwriting discipline and appropriate reserving and on the other hand business growth and current-year profits. Actuaries are responsible for providing assurance on reserves and opinions on both the underwriting and reinsurance strategies of firms, implying strong engagement with the risk function, as well as independence and objectivity in their assessments. Events like today’s, where actuaries come together to share knowledge, with the aim of raising professional standards, are particularly important and welcome. Chart 1  4  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Chart 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  5

A problem, of course, was the persistent weakness of the Euro in foreign exchange markets, despite strong "fundamentals" in terms of conventional analysis. This was largely the result of an outflow of capital, much of it drawn into the US by the magnetic attraction of prospective corporate earnings growth – and apparently continuing despite the US slowdown. The euro's weakness gave rise to widespread – but in my view unjustified – criticism of the ECB. The task of a central bank operating an independent monetary policy is necessarily a limited task, not least because it effectively has only one instrument – its control over short-term interest rates. Its role – as I said earlier – is essentially, to use that instrument to influence aggregate demand in the economy, with the aim of keeping demand broadly in line with the supply-side capacity of the economy. The measure of its success is consistently low inflation. Against that criterion the ECB has been relatively successful. The Euro area economy has grown, above trend, with core inflation nevertheless remaining within the tolerance range of 0-2%, even though on the headline measure, influenced by rising oil prices and the weaker exchange rate, inflation has for the time being moved above the top of that range. The ECB would have put that internal stability of the Euro area as a whole at risk if it had attempted at the same time to use monetary policy to target the euro's exchange rate.
As you may know, the membership has just agreed to an increase of 45 percent, equivalent to about $ billion, in IMF quotas. This will raise the capital base of the institution to some $ billion. In addition, the Fund has taken steps to augment its financial resources through the agreement on the New Arrangements to Borrow. Under these arrangements, participants would be prepared to lend up to the equivalent of some $ billion when additional resources are needed to forestall or cope with an impairment of the international monetary system, or deal with an exceptional situation that poses a threat to the stability of the system. We hope that participants who have not yet done so will complete the necessary legislative action so that these arrangements can enter into force soon. BIS Review 111/1997  -6-  Furthermore, in order to allow all members to participate on an equitable basis in the SDR system, agreement has been reached on a proposal to amend the Fund’s Articles of Agreement to authorize a special one-time allocation of SDRs of about $ billion that would equalize all members’ ratios of SDR allocations to quotas and would double the amount of SDRs allocated to date. These resources will supplement members’ reserves, giving them more flexibility in economic policies and a cushion against adverse developments. Last but not least, recent experience has demonstrated once again that early warnings cannot always prevent crisis from blowing up.

Net interest income has been an important driver of the improved bank performance, on account of the steeper yield curve and wider operating margins. The tightening of credit standards, the gradual pass-through of lower policy rates to lending rates and declining competitive pressures in the credit market have all contributed to higher revenues from core banking business. Trading income has increased even more strongly as the financial markets  4  BIS Review 168/2009  recovered after the first quarter of 2009 and has been the main contributor, on average, to the increase in revenues as a percentage of assets. With regard to bank capital positions and loan-loss provisions, I would like to highlight the following points. The recovery in major banks’ earnings, the slowdown in the growth rate of both risk-weighted and total assets and increases in capital have contributed to a slight increase in the regulatory capital ratios of the median institutions. Even those institutions with the lowest regulatory capital ratios comfortably exceed at present the minimum requirements (see the left side of Chart 11). Provisions on impaired assets had been a serious drag on euro area LCBGs’ incomes in 2007 and 2008. To a large extent these provisions still related to securitised loans, although the share of loan impairments had started to grow. Most institutions have reported sharply higher provisions for loan losses (see the right side of Chart 11). Moreover, expressed as a percentage of total loans, loan-loss provisions were the highest in the third quarter compared to the five preceding years.
Thus, the Supervision Department of the National Bank of Romania was set up with technical assistance from the Nederlandsche Bank. Also, forex and market operations developed from the co-operation with our colleagues from the Belgian central bank. Another form of cooperation between the member states of the Constituency was the fact that since 1993, a second constituency meeting at the level of ministers and governors was held annually in one of the member countries, on a rotating basis. The IMF management and senior staff were invited to speak on issues of interest. I have participated to almost all constituency meetings since 1990. I could testify that each of them was interesting and  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  fruitful. As a veteran I cannot help but remember the first meeting after the fall of communism, in September 1990. At that time I met three not only impressive tall men, but also, outstanding personalities: Governor Wim Duisenberg, Minister Wim Kok and Executive Director Goddard Posthumus. I have to say I had the honour to collaborate with all the executive directors of our constituency. Thus, it is a pleasure to remember the extraordinary relationships developed with Onno Wijnholds, Age Bakker, Jeroen Kremers, Governor Nout Wellink and Minister Gerrit Zahn. Dear colleagues and friends, I am proud to say that the constituency meeting held in June this year, in Romania, where both Belgium and Luxembourg representatives were invited, was a step forward towards this formal outcome.

What, I think, is more useful for businesses to hang on to is our expectation that when Bank Rate does rise, it will probably do so only gradually and to a level that is likely to remain materially below its pre-crisis average of 5% for some while – I have something like a 2–3% range in mind here. That reflects three factors. First, the process of private and public balance sheet repair will continue to weigh on domestic demand for some time, while the recovery in the euro area – our main export market – is likely to remain muted. Second, global longer-term safe real interest rates fell in the years before the crisis, reflecting in particular the unusually high saving rates in China, and this is likely to persist. Third, the spreads between risky market interest rates and Bank Rate are unlikely to return to their excessively compressed pre-crisis levels. So even if we start to withdraw some of the exceptional monetary stimulus in the not too distant future, you should not expect Bank Rate to shoot straight back up to pre-crisis levels. It is now five years since we cut Bank Rate to its historic low of 0.5% and launched our asset purchase programme (QE). Those five years have been tough for both businesses and households. But they surely would have been even tougher had we not taken that action.
I think this is now a conclusion shared by all Central Bankers in the world, whatever the regulatory environment they live in. An intimate knowledge of the banking sector and of different financial institutions is extremely helpful in managing periods of tensions and stress on money and credit markets. Central Banks have had to make almost instant judgment on the provision of liquidity in different forms and different maturities. There are circumstances where being able to assess the creditworthiness of market participants and the effective amplitude of their needs is of extreme help. More generally (and somehow academically), in times of crisis, the distinction between liquidity and solvency problems becomes both more important and much more difficult to make. Having, so to speak, all the cards in your hands, minimizes the risk of making mistakes. Second, as concerns the supervision infrastructure, it seems to me that clear, simple, robust and pragmatic arrangements have performed better than more sophisticated and elaborate schemes. As you know, I had myself to face a situation of acute crisis and make decisisions in real time, concerning a major, and internationally active, financial institution. At no time did I have the feeling that our current arrangements were deficient and prevented me for getting the necessary information and making the necessary decisions. As you also know, seen from a public interest perspective, we could solve the situation without any significant disturbance to capital market. Nobody knows about the future.

Yet, after more than a year of crisis, credit markets remain very fragile, normal interbank relationships have not been reestablished, and those frictions could destabilize the financing of the corporate sector, thus further threatening economic growth. With our last decision, we have given financial intermediaries full assurance that their liquidity needs will be met, in an environment of total clarity and absolute predictability. We hope that this will contribute to reduce uncertainty and restore confidence between counterparties, which is a prerequisite to a functional money market. This may depend on more than simple liquidity provision. But central bank’s ability – and willingness – to use their capacity are a major source of stability in the financial system, and should be seen as such, both by market participants and the general public. BIS Review 122/2008  1  Second, on monetary policy. We have participated in a concerted action by major Central Banks This is a major, and unprecedented, move to restore confidence, but one, I want to emphasize, fully and absolutely consistent with our mandate. It is obvious to all observers that the overall environment has dramatically changed in the last three weeks. Declining oil and commodity prices, together with stagnant activity have significantly altered the inflation outlook. Based on current conditions, we can expect "instant" inflation rate to come under our definition of price stability somewhere in the middle of 2009.
In this market segment, business is conducted bilaterally on an over-the-counter (OTC) basis – typically by phone or through electronic trading platforms like Tradeweb and Bloomberg that are based on the traditional request-for-quote model. The U.S. Treasury has issued a detailed request for information seeking public comment on the many factors that are affecting the structure and liquidity of the U.S. Treasury market, and is seeking comments on the relevant data gaps. 4 This is an important step that will help clarify what further work is needed in this area. Even in the corporate bond market where we have detailed TRACE transaction data, this still tells an incomplete story. TRACE data show what trades have taken place, not what trades have potentially been foregone because of any possible diminution of market liquidity. Gaining a better understanding of this phenomenon is being actively researched by my staff. In contrast to the market liquidity metrics such as bid-ask spreads, indirect evidence on market liquidity suggests that there has been a decline. Asset managers report that large blocks of securities are now harder to buy and sell without generating significant movements in prices. Also, average trade sizes have decreased (Exhibit 4) and there is evidence of a growing bifurcation in the corporate bond market, with greater activity and liquidity in those bonds that were issued more recently, larger in size or brought to market by larger issuers.

Lending and provisioning standards, reporting requirements, minimum capital adequacy and customer due diligence requirements are among the key areas in which there is still little formal distinction made to address the impact of such regulations on the access to financial services to low income households and small borrowers. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Global standard setting bodies therefore have an important role in accelerating the conversion of proportionality principles into practice. This will also be important in the assessment of national financial systems and how it measures up against global standards. For example, under the Financial Sector Assessment Programme (FSAP). Therefore, there are significant benefits to be gained from the provision of guidance to authorities on how regulation can be assessed for its impact on access. Such considerations could also be reflected in the methodologies adopted by international bodies for financial sector assessments and peer reviews. The capacity and capabilities of authorities to provide supervisory oversight financial activities that target the underserved is equally important. Our experience has been that the supervisory skillsets required to evaluate the effectiveness of controls over microfinancing and microinsurance operations differ substantially from those traditionally applied to the retail portfolios of banks and insurance companies. A greater understanding of the product design implications, the relationships that a financial service provider has with its customers and the different motivations that drive consumer behaviour will be important. This is to avoid counterproductive supervisory actions on financial access.
The turnaround has been underpinned by government-provided downside protection of financial institutions’ balance sheets, which has reduced tail risk, improving macroeconomic news and better than expected earnings, especially by financial institutions. Against this background, the equity markets have rebounded, led by financial stocks. At the same time, historically low levels of money market interest rates have induced a hunt for yield among investors, triggering outflows from bank deposits and money market funds into riskier assets, including corporate bonds issued by lower-rated borrowers. Euro area bond and equity markets Over the past six months, euro area long-term bond yields have declined. However, in late November 2009, the slope of the euro area yield curve remained steeper than at any point in time since the launch of the euro, due to the past declines in short-term market rates (See Chart 8). Intra-euro area sovereign spreads, as well as euro area sovereign CDS spreads, have narrowed further, in some cases to pre-Lehman levels, until very recently, when a few have widened again. Looking ahead, the prospects for euro area government bonds continue to be surrounded by persistent uncertainty about future macro-financial developments. Upward risks to yields could stem from a further unwinding of flight-to-safety and flight-to-liquidity flows. In addition, slower than expected growth might increase the financing needs of euro area governments and bond markets might face difficulties in absorbing higher government bond issuance.

As I initially explained, the institutional reforms that have been adopted or are being adopted to establish a banking union constitute important progress. But to meet the ultimate objective of strengthening financial stability, implementation is key. And implementation is well under way: the Supervisory Board has held its first three meetings; a Framework Regulation has been prepared and is now the subject of a public consultation; and work is progressing on the supervisory model of the SSM with the Supervisory Manual. One of the first major implementation tests is the comprehensive assessment, the health check of the euro area banking system, which is currently being conducted as a prelude to the SSM becoming operational. Here, the ECB is making good progress in establishing the new structures and ensuring that the exercise will be fair, transparent and stringent. But many more steps still lie ahead of us. A final challenge relates to the macro-prudential arm of the SSM. As you know, the SSM Regulation gives the ECB the power to apply stricter macro-prudential measures than the national authorities if it deems them necessary. We can also advise on the calibration of instruments. This goes some way towards insuring against an inaction bias at the national level, thus improving the prospects for a more stable euro area financial system. We will maintain a clear separation of objectives between the macro-prudential policy framework and monetary policy and a clear hierarchy, with price stability remaining the ECB’s overall primary objective.