This requires the remittance industry developing guidelines for good governance and risk management. Similarly, authorities should give guidance on how to meet antimoney laundering and combating terrorist financing activity requirements in a manner that such laws do not deter genuine remittance transfers. Global and regional payment groups' support In implementing the general principles for the international remittance services, the multilateral organizations, such as Asian Development Bank (ADB), World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) jointly have developed guidelines, of which the final report is expected to be released by end 2006. The host/home country authorities should then evaluate their remittance systems against each general principle and foster dialogue within and among countries, where possible, through regional initiatives in payment systems, such as Financial Sector Assessment Programs (FSAPs), Arab Payments Initiatives (API), Commonwealth of Independent States Payment Initiatives (CISPI) and Western Hemisphere Fund (WHF). Behind the general principles, the critical elements are greater competition, high service level risk mitigation, appropriate regulations and enhancement of payment infrastructure on domestic as well as cross-border. In implementing the general principles, it is also important for governments in both host/home countries to recognize remittance service as part of public policy. Similarly, under the provisions of the General Agreement on Trade for Services (GATS), opportunities should be sought for movements of natural persons for delivery of services. Many countries, including Sri Lanka, attempt to re-orient their policies to encourage skill migration under GATS.

When each use case is finished, and value has been delivered, lessons learnt can be applied to the next use case. To give a concrete example, an early use case we identified in last year’s review was data on lending for commercial real estate. Commercial real estate lending, or CRE, is an important sector for any central bank charged with guarding financial stability. Following the great financial crisis, Andy Haldane (then the Bank of England’s Executive Director for Financial Stability, now our Chief Economist), suggested that commercial property has contributed more to financial crises than any other area of industry outside of banking6. As Alex Brazier, his successor as Financial Stability ED subsequently put it, when commercial real estate catches a cold, the whole economy starts to shiver7. So we need good data on CRE lending. But the sector has a tradition of negotiated, paper contracts, and a lack of automation in how loans were agreed and managed. This has meant that accessing good quality data on the CRE market is difficult, both for regulators and for market participants. To help address this, industry participants are working on creating a central utility for accessing granular CRE data8. But creating this utility will mean firms need to share the data used to run their CRE businesses. And they will need a common way to identify and label core CRE data – for example a consistent way of labelling the ‘Loan amount’ of a CRE loan, or the loan’s ‘arrangement fees’.