The increased use of cards is an international trend and is expected to gain significance in Malaysia. Giro transfers, other credit transfers and direct debit are also gaining significance by both individuals and businesses. Finally, Internet banking has also begun to experience stronger growth. While we have made considerable progress in promoting the adoption of electronic payment with notable growth registered across all electronic payment methods, paper-based payments still remains the more popular form of payment. Cheques continue to account for a high percentage of the total non-cash retail payments while currency-in-circulation (CIC) as a percentage of GDP remains relatively high at 5.7%. In 2006, Malaysian consumers on average, made only 0.7 transaction via direct debit and credit transfer and 0.2 transaction via debit card transaction as compared to 84.7 and 109.5 transactions, respectively, in Sweden. Hence, more needs to be done to raise the level of adoption of electronic payments. In this regard, the Bank has formulated an Electronic Payments Roadmap aimed at bringing together relevant stakeholders to address the barriers that have impeded the increased adoption of electronic payment in a comprehensive and strategic manner. The Roadmap identifies the priority areas that require attention and collaboration to promote an environment that is conducive for greater use of electronic payment in financial transactions. Firstly, is the need to put in place the payment infrastructure. The infrastructure for making payments would need to be widened and enhanced to provide the convenient access to electronic payments.

In addition, Banque de France has launched in June 2017 “Le Lab”. Le Lab is a genuine Open Innovation laboratory: its goal is to bring new practices and technologies into our activities, and to that end experiment where necessary within short and flexible cycles. To do so, it works in close collaboration with innovative firms. And, we launched this year our first “suptech” program to promote the use of artificial intelligence in the performance of supervisory tasks. To illustrate how we can leverage on the daily contact with innovators, to help changing regulation or defining supervisory expectations, I will take the example of the on-going work on artificial intelligence by the ACPR Fintech team. When the ACPR published their report on AI in 2018, we made it clear that the purpose was not to regulate ex ante, with a risk of hindering a promising technology. However, it seemed to us important to raise at an early stage the key  issues of governance, ethics, auditability and explainability, in order to promote a sound development of AI in the financial sector. And the Fintech team did not stop there. They have been conducting experimentations with voluntary financial institutions or providers to explore these issues further, on a few significant AI use cases (AML-CT, internal models and consumer protection). Bilateral meetings were complemented by tests in real conditions, where ACPR experts and data scientists from the Banque de France were able to run algorithms, modulate parameters, test new population samples or compare different models.