This applies as well for key Shariah personnel in Islamic financial institutions, including Islamic windows. The aim is to ensure Shariah advisors and personnel are equipped with the necessary knowledge that 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  transcends across various disciplines including legal, finance and taxation matters. The timeline for compliance will be decided later. My final point is to engage the world more openly. Issues of Shariah are complex and sometimes difficult to discern. But they are important, and matter very much to a wide range of stakeholders. As Imam Ash-Shafi’i reportedly said, “Knowledge is that which benefits, not that which is memorised”3. Hence, in keeping with the changing landscape of the industry, engaging more openly and transparently about views and decisions will enhance understanding and acceptance. Views and opinions are man-made and should be challenged, questioned and debated through civil and intellectual discourse. During the Islamic Golden Age, such discourses and challenging of ideas were commonplace to assess the veracity of knowledge. Al Haytham, who wrote the influential ‘Book of Optics’, once said: “The duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads.... He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it..” The goal for us today should be to forge greater understanding and acceptance.

Intermediaries continue to be at the centre, even as distribution becomes more decentralised with diverse players and new ways of connecting with customers. Stepping a layer down, let us now examine the underlying Infrastructure of financial services. Technology is enabling a fundamentally different approach to financial infrastructure, compared to the centralised systems of today. Take for example, open crypto networks based on self-executing smart contracts and noncustodial financial services, where users maintain control over their assets at all times. By replacing intermediaries and central parties, these networks aim to reduce both the cost and risk of finance. By decentralising key aspects of financial infrastructure, such as access, data, and code, open crypto networks can also potentially enhance inclusion and innovation. When firms of all sizes, and even individuals, can directly access financial infrastructure, it could mean more competition and inclusion. When transaction data is available to all participants, and not confined within the intermediary responsible for the transaction as is the case today, it could mean more contestability and transparency. W hen code can run directly and publicly on these networks, unlike proprietary code that runs on private servers, it could mean more interoperability and innovation. We are certainly not at the point where these self-governing networks can meet the high standards of governance, security, resilience that we demand of critical infrastructure. Even so, central banks would do well to incorporate these innovations in designing the next generation of payment infrastructure. These ideas could be particularly relevant to the development of CBDCs.