samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Industry players need to step up to next level to enhance consumer experience The Project Greenback initiative in Sabah will lay a strong foundation for industry players to take the digitalization agenda to the next level. We must remember that disruptive technologies can radically change the way things are done. The old ways may not work anymore. Consumers are increasingly looking for convenience, speed, and low cost remittance services. Most importantly, they are looking for service providers they can trust. Competition is getting more intense. To illustrate this, let me share with you a CNN article on Amazon Go. Amazon Go is the future of retail shopping. You can walk into the convenience store, grab what you need, and you will receive a message that your credit card is charged for your purchase. The question is, what will be the future of the remittance sector? For the industry players, y o u can re-shape the remittance landscape. Use technology to eliminate the major pain points in remittance, to better understand consumer behavior and needs, and to offer consumers a positive remittance experience from the start. Within the migrant communities, words travel fast. We know that word-of-mouth is the most effective form of marketing. Although I believe that the brick-and-mortar stores are here to stay with digitalization, the savings incurred from not having to pay for overheads can translate to lower remittance costs for consumers. Ultimately, when there is greater use of authorised remittance channels, we can reduce remittances that are transferred through illegal operators.

Conclusion Let me conclude with the words of Nobel Laureate George Bernard Shaw – “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything”. Project Greenback has initiated a change in Sabah’s remittance landscape. Let us keep the momentum going. Sabah can be the model state to promote the use of technology for remittance. Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, in particular, is exploring to implement a similar initiative in the Philippines and we would be happy to share our experience. On that note, I wish you a fruitful event tomorrow. Thank you. 3/3  BIS central bankers' speeches
It is therefore important for Islamic finance practitioners to have greater understanding on the scope of SRI to effectively match the segments of opportunities available in the SRI space. 3/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  An imperative to the successful outcomes of the key growth areas is the availability of multiskilled and top-notch talent in the industry. In Malaysia, we have over 26,000 talents in the Islamic banking industry and a holistic infrastructural ecosystem that supports their developmental needs. As we move forward, we need a deep talent pool with wider set of competencies beyond the scope of Islamic finance knowledge to provide the additional competitive edge to the industry. Continuous nurturing of Islamic finance talent, with intellectual diversity in other related disciplines such as economics, finance, law and financial technology can give rise to new visions and wisdoms that go beyond traditional boundaries. Under the current scenario, talent development is crucial at every level of the organisation from the Board to Shariah committee members as well as front-liners. Currently, an initiative is underway to develop a dedicated programme for Board of Islamic financial institutions with a scope that includes wide-ranging and unique issues within the Islamic finance industry. The Shariah Leaders Education Programme that has commenced since last year has enriched more than 100 local Shariah scholars with the necessary governance and business insights for them to effectively perform their roles as Shariah Committee members.

Interest rates in France are also among the lowest in Europe: the average nominal rate on new bank loans is currently less than 2% compared with 5% in 2007. Lastly, SMEs generally have little difficulty obtaining investment loans: according to the Banque de France’s survey, in the third quarter of 2015, 92% of loan applications were accepted (i.e. at least 75% of the amount requested was granted), although there is still room for improvement in the case of VSEs. At the same time, bond financing is increasing. The trend towards the diversification of debt financing appears to be more marked in France than in neighbouring European countries, with companies increasingly turning to capital markets to meet their funding needs. The disintermediation rate, that is the share of bond financing in overall corporate debt, has risen from 24.2% in 2008 to 38.6% in 2015, compared with respective rates of 14.1% and 13.5% for Germany and Italy. Nonetheless, in France, market financing is mainly the preserve of large corporations, accounting for some 70% of their total financial debt, compared with 25% for mid-caps and less than 5% for SMEs. Yet forcing them to switch to disintermediated financing would make little sense: this diversification of funding has to remain optional, driven by demand from companies themselves, rather than being imposed according to a set timetable and predefined objectives. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  c) The priority of increasing equity funding can be achieved via several channels.
The recent developments following the war will push inflation higher in 2022, with negative consequences on the purchasing power of households and investment decisions of firms. We have, for this reason, begun adjusting monetary policy accordingly. When the necessary conditions, as set out during our recent monetary policy strategy review, are satisfied, we can take additional steps towards policy normalisation, always taking into account the high uncertainty and the underlying risks caused by the war. Hence preserving flexibility is of paramount importance. A fundamental difference of the current crisis with the one faced a decade ago is that the Cyprus banking system is not part of the problem now but it can and must be part of the solution. The Cyprus banking sector has the buffers to absorb unexpected shocks, both from a solvency and a liquidity perspective. The core regulatory ratios of Cyprus Banks compare well with our European peers, providing our banks with the capability to  2/3  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  absorb losses and to fund the real economy through lines of credit to both viable businesses and households and be accommodative for the transmission of monetary policy. In this ever changing global terrain, we shall be neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Instead, we shall act; and we shall act in a responsible manner with realism and honesty. The citizens of Europe need to be aware of the challenges and difficulties. A well-informed citizen acts more responsibly. And that's the best answer to any challenge.

We, here in Cyprus, know what a challenge is and how to overcome it. A country at the edge of the Mediterranean sea, has managed to place itself to the political and economic core of the European continent. A small island with a part of it under occupation, thrives thanks to its extroversion and its people, who despite having been put to the test so many times in the past, have never stopped creating, evolving and moving forward. I have no doubt that together with our European partners we will take all the necessary actions to overcome this challenge as well, guided by our common core values and principles. As the great French novelist Victor Hugo said, "Changez vos opinions, gardez vos principes; changez vos feuilles, gardez intactes vos raciness" "Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots". Here in Cyprus we often say that "a captain is proven capable when she is in a storm". And hence, I consider ourselves lucky since our ECB captain steering us through both the Covid and geopolitical storms is Christine Lagarde, a leader of undoubted capacity and experience, whom I thank again for being with us today and would like to invite her to the podium to share her thoughts with us. 3/3  BIS - Central bankers' speeches
Conference of the ACPR – Palais Brongniart, 8 June 2018 The major issues at stake in the review of prudential supervision of banks  Speech by François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Banque de France, Chairman of the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution (ACPR)  Press contact: Mark Deen (mark.deen@banque-france.fr). Page 1 of 6 Ladies and Gentlemen, I am very pleased to welcome you to this conference of the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution (ACPR), which this morning focuses on major issues at stake in the review of prudential supervision of banks. The subject is not new, but it is always topical. Let me first stress the greater degree of security already achieved in prudential matters: the agreement of 7 December 2017 on the finalisation of Basel III and the now standard use of macroprudential instruments. I will then touch on what remains to be done in Europe, specifically the completion of the Banking Union, an essential step. ** I. The implementation of the Basel III agreement of 7 December 2017  in Europe, fully respecting the envisaged timetable, is essential The finalisation of Basel III – and not of Basel IV, definitely not – brings to an end a decade of regulatory efforts which have considerably strengthened the resilience of the international banking system. I reiterate that the agreement of 7 December 2017 is the best possible agreement for France and for Europe.

It is this excessive credit cycle – the risk of “go and stop” seen during financial crises – that a moderate capital buffer must seek to smooth out. It should be noted in passing that a clear majority of Member States of the European Union have adopted other macroprudential measures  Page 3 of 6 to specifically limit residential lending, constraining households: in my view it is out of the question in France. II. To reduce fragmentation and improve private risk sharing in Europe, we must now complete the Banking Union. We must now resolutely work towards completing the European Banking Union. I would first like to explain why. The finalisation of the Banking Union should, alongside the Capital Markets Union, contribute to improving private risk sharing within the euro area. Private risk sharing fulfils an economic stabilisation function: in the United States, for example, private financial flows between the federal states are a more powerful damper than budget mechanisms involved in public risk sharing. Furthermore, this private risk sharing should help to channel the euro area’s large savings surplus – EUR 390 billion in 2017 – towards European companies, within a real Financing Union for Investment and Innovation at the European level. We have taken a step forward with the agreement of 25 May at the Ecofin Council meeting on the "banking reform package" set out in the Commission's legislative proposal of 23 November 2016.
Among the challenges we see today, even at the most sophisticated institutions, are the following: •  bringing more integration to the assessment of market and credit risk and the interactions between them,  •  capturing, measuring and aggregating credit exposures stemming from activities across all of a firm’s business lines,  •  assessing the value of positions in portfolios of more complex and less liquid products,  •  capturing the potential implications on market liquidity and price movements of the unwinding of common positions across market participants, and  2/3  •  assessing the implications of the exit of a major counterparty, particularly in the more concentrated segments of the market, and the limitations imposed by the size of the institution itself in responding to adverse market conditions. Together, the three areas I’ve discussed—challenges in counterparty risk management with respect to hedge funds, developments in the credit derivatives market and infrastructure and ongoing work to improve stress testing and scenario analysis–represent areas where uncertainty is necessarily high. And assessing the probability of various outcomes and the potential losses associated with those outcomes is very complicated and hard to do well. Doing so requires care, judgment and a portfolio of different approaches. This is particularly important to do well in a context when we have had such a sustained period of relatively low credit losses and low volatility.

In such an environment, companies too will have to carefully manage the higher input and other costs and how much of that to pass on to consumers, to preserve your margins without losing either competitiveness or affordability. BIS Review 60/2008  1  Subprime crisis and Asia’s continued push to deepen capital markets The second issue is the turmoil in global financial markets. The transmission of the crisis is a good illustration of how inter-connected financial markets are today. The problem started with US subprime mortgages, in fact a relatively small part of the US mortgage market, but it rapidly escalated into other securitized markets, to more generic debt capital instruments and eventually into the wholesale or LIBOR money markets. From there, as central bank surveys have shown, there is now a general tightening of lending conditions to end-borrowers, which are exerting a drag on the US and Western European economies. Asia has felt some of the tremors of this crisis, but as yet we have been relatively unscathed. In the banking sector, a number of banks in the region wrote off losses on their US sub-prime mortgage related assets. Compared to their peers in the US and Europe, the impact on their balance sheets and profitability has been less severe. This can be attributed to a combination of factors. Following the Asian financial crisis, banks here had taken active steps to improve their credit standing by enhancing their capital base.
The “Large banks” panel shows results for all banks with total assets of £ or above, and separately calculated results for all banks with total assets of £ or above. For both of these definitions of “Large”, results are separately calculated using six definitions of distress: 1) Distress defined as receiving worst possible supervisory rating between July 2007 and December 2008; 2) receiving worst possible supervisory rating between July 2007 and December 2009; 3) any instance of default, receipt of state aid, or merger with or acquisition by another bank under stressed conditions between July 2007 and December 2008; 4) any instance of default, receipt of state aid, or merger with or acquisition by another bank under stressed conditions between July 2007 and December 2009; 5) meets definition 1 or 3; 6) meets definition 2 or 4. Similarly, the “Small banks” panel shows results for all banks with total assets of less than £ and results for all banks with total assets of less than £ in each case using all six definitions of distress. 10  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  10  Figure 2: Illustration of a graduated prudential framework Under a graduated prudential framework, the regulatory rules a firm faces would widen and become more complex as a firm grows larger and/or undertakes a wider range of activities that are more complex, converging eventually on the Basel standards, as illustrated by the following diagrams.

As you know, we in the Executive Board decided to leave the repo rate unchanged at our latest monetary policy meeting. At the same time, however, we were in agreement that the Swedish business cycle is fairly close to the point at which it is reasonable to give monetary policy a less expansionary stance. Although we all endorsed the outlook for inflation and the economy in the Inflation Report a number of us were of the opinion that it provided scope for somewhat different interpretations of exactly when the interest rate needs to be raised. I myself and two other members  2  4  For a more detailed overview of the debate; see Bean, C. (2003), "Asset Prices, Financial Imbalances and Monetary Policy: Are Inflation Targets Enough? ", speech at a BIS conference on "Monetary Stability, Financial Stability and the Business Cycle", 28-29 March 2003, Basel, Switzerland. (http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/speeches/2003/speech200.pdf)  BIS Review 88/2005  interpreted the analysis in such a way that we deemed an increase of 0.25 percentage points to be warranted already at the time of the monetary policy meeting. Allow me to say something about the reasons that, in my opinion, suggest that it would have been appropriate to take a first step towards less expansionary monetary policy at the beginning of December. One is that there hardly can be any doubt now that we are in the midst of a strong, stable cyclical upswing.
The Government has in fact been able to draw on its PRGF resources to compensate for the shortfalls in Government revenues over the first half of 2009 that I have alluded to earlier. However, when all is said and done, Africa still needs to mobilize both foreign and domestic sources of finance that provide sustainable sources of investment. How can Africa best arrest the recent reversal of FDI inflows generated by the global financial and economic crisis and encourage domestic resource mobilization i.e. boost domestic savings rates? In my view, ensuring that we retain our focus on consolidating macroeconomic stability is a critical element of Africa’s response to the current crisis. For many of our economies, inflation has been pushed beyond the single digit level, and we must all therefore work hard to re-establish low levels of inflation as soon as possible. The ability to attract FDI inflows is also a function of the supporting infrastructure and the existence of a business environment that supports innovation, initiative, and hard work. In this regard Africa must not relent on efforts to improve infrastructure development, and lower the cost of doing business. This is a process which is being actively pursued in Zambia, where great strides have been made to reduce the number of business licenses required and to streamline licensing procedures, in addition to the establishment of an organisation, the Zambia Development Agency, to spearhead and support FDI flows and domestically financed investment.

We do see increased interest in cross border investments from within our region, particularly in the financial sector. With respect to the need to mobilize domestic savings, Africa certainly needs to expand the reach of the financial sector and to make the financial sector more efficient. In Zambia, the majority of the population does not have access to financial products. The Bank of Zambia has therefore made advancing financial inclusion as one of its strategic objectives. Zambia has a very low population density and there are many areas that are currently not served by any financial institution. Reaching these areas will require the application of technology and the concept of branchless banking. To facilitate such innovation, a robust regulatory regime governing the payment system has been implemented with the enactment of the National Payment Systems Act in 2007. In this regard, Zambia is learning a lot from the advances made in countries such as Uganda and Kenya, where cell phone technology has expanded the reach of financial services and products. On its part the Zambian Government is also taking concrete steps to enhance the application of Information and Communication Technology across the broad spread of Government services and the private sector. How can we build better and more resilient institutions that boost confidence in the benefits of a market economy and can act as strong anchors of inflation expectations?
In addition, inflation mostly affects social classes less able to protect themselves against changes in nominal prices, if only because the larger part of their financial assets is held in a current account with no or fixed interest. Moreover, as I mentioned earlier, inflation tends to discourage long-term saving, especially that directed towards pension funds. This prevents people from securing their savings for long-term purposes in a reliable way. In the long run this could affect the people’s sense of belonging to society. As John Stuart Mill once said, money (we might say price stability) is one of those instruments whose importance is only felt when put out of order. Over the last century, the European economies and societies have had sufficient experience of this to value the wisdom of this judgement. Times may, of course, have changed. You may think that this concern is now a bit old-fashioned. I would just say that monitoring and combating inflationary pressures is a permanent task. It is an essential feature of a market economy that it will generate inflationary or, less often, deflationary tensions from time to time. It is not because the river is regulated that the dam is useless! What about the other policy areas? How can they best contribute to sustaining high non-inflationary growth? Taking stock of the broad policy developments currently observed in the euro area might suggest that there is little to worry about.

In the same period, we have reduced cheque usage by more than 40% to 119 million cheques. We have almost doubled the number of point-of-sale (POS) terminals to over 407,000 units. Debit card transactions have also increased by more than six times to 162 million transactions in 2017. All these are achievements that we should be proud of as a collective industry. The progress that we have achieved so far is only possible with the collective contribution of all in the industry. This annual award ceremony recognises the achievements of those who have contributed to the progress, modernisation and enhancement of our payment systems. 1/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  While we celebrate our achievements, we need to forge ahead with greater vigour and perseverance, especially to displace cash. Cash remains prevalent in most retail transactions in Malaysia. Managing cash is expensive. This is most evident among lower tier merchants, who continue to prefer transacting in cash. It is more costly to use cash, as you know, and much cheaper, efficient and secure to adopt e-payments. It is a cost effective solution that makes business sense. Based on a study by the Royal Bank of Scotland and Natwest in 2014, a customer who uses mobile and online banking instead of going to a physical bank branch stands to enjoy about 24 hours of time saved and about 10 kilometers of travelling distance saved per year.