Studies of the behaviour of doctors illustrate this pattern (Gigerenzer and Kurzenhäuser (2005)). Fearing misdiagnosis, perhaps litigation, doctors are prone to tick the boxes. That may mean over-diagnosing drugs or over-submitting patients to hospital. Both are defensive actions, reducing risks to the doctor. But both are a potential health hazard to the patient. For  7  Gigerenzer and Brighton (2009). BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  example, submitting patients to hospital increases significantly their risk of secondary infection. Hospitals are, after all, full of sick people. Doctors unencumbered by a complex rulebook will have fewer incentives to act defensively. They may also be better able to form their own independent judgements when diagnosing medical problems, using their accumulated experience. That ought to more closely align a doctor’s risk incentives with their patient’s. The same is likely to be true of other professions, from lawyers to policemen to bank supervisors. Of course, simple rules are not costless. They place a heavy reliance on the judgement of the decision-maker, on picking appropriate heuristics. Here, a key ingredient is the decision-maker’s level of experience, since heuristics are learned behaviours honed by experience. A dog will outperform a puppy at frisbee-catching because it has had time to fine-tune its “gaze heuristic”. An expert baseball player or cricketer will outperform a novice sportsman for the same reason. So too will an experienced doctor or detective or fund manager or shopkeeper. These are “Five Commandments” of decision-making under uncertainty. That description is apt.

These developments are for the benefit of the real economy – and more particularly the corporate sector – in France and in Europe: a myriad of so called “Fintechs” are now emerging. They are competing with incumbents, notably in the United States, and are proposing not only new ways of paying but also new services related to payments (such as account aggregation). So there are high industrial stakes involved, and we must foster active competition, which is far preferable to monopolies, even technological ones. Given the importance of payments in many aspects of our economy, we need a comprehensive 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  strategy. Most importantly, innovation should be spurred, whether it comes from start-ups or incumbents. This is exactly the purpose of the French national strategy for retail payments – consistent with the European framework. This French strategy was developed last year through a cooperative process: it aims at modernizing payments, by relying on the dematerialization of processes in different fields, such as e-invoicing, e-mandates for SEPA Direct debits, virtual wallets, etc. The implementation of this strategy has been entrusted to the National Committee for Payments (CNPS), your co-host for this conference, which gathers representatives from both the supply and the demand side and is chaired by the Banque de France. Going beyond the sole payments sphere, innovation in the financial sector can generate significant benefits that have to be reaped. It has the potential to foster financial inclusion all over the world, as long as people are provided with internet access.