Building the Infrastructure to Realise FinTech’s Promise Speech given by Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England  International FinTech Conference 2017, Old Billingsgate 12 April 2017  I am grateful to Nicola Anderson, Sharmista Appaya, Alice Carr, Helen George, Andrew Hauser, Rosey Jeffrey, Varun Paul, Gregory Stevens and Iain de Weymarn for their assistance in preparing these remarks. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  Introduction It’s a pleasure to be in this historic setting at the heart of the world’s leading international financial centre and its global hub for FinTech. 1  Such leadership reflects the UK’s inherent strengths: its people, law, language and time zone. And it is testament to the City’s fundamental belief in markets and innovation. Over the centuries, we have learned that markets and innovation thrive with the right hard and soft infrastructure: hard infrastructure ranging from transport links to broadband and payments architecture; and soft infrastructure from the rule of law to market practices, codes of conduct, and regulatory frameworks. --------------------------When Horace Jones was re-imagining Old Billingsgate Market, Britain was in the throes of its Second Industrial Revolution – a time of mass innovation that changed the way people lived, worked and interacted. Throughout the nineteenth century technological advances – including steam, electricity, and the telegraph – fostered new industries and made possible an unprecedented openness to trade, people, and ideas.

We are a member of Hyperledger along with private market participants and tech firms. 14  And we will make our next generation RTGS compatible with  settlement in a distributed ledger. It is not clear, however, that that the only challenges are technological. Indeed, the FCA highlighted earlier this week that settlement times could also be cut using existing technologies. 15  This requires market  participants to change their collective practices as it takes more than one intermediary in a chain to compress settlement times. Conclusion FinTech’s promise springs from its potential to unbundle banking into its core functions of settling payments, performing maturity transformation, sharing risk and allocating capital. This possibility is being realised by new entrants – payment service providers, aggregators and robo advisors, peer-to-peer lenders, and innovative trading platforms. And it is being influenced by incumbents who are adopting new technologies to reinforce the economies of scale and scope of their business models. FinTech could deliver significant benefits to households and businesses across this country and across the world. FinTech can widen access to financial services and bring new sources of credit. It can connect customers better with their finances and empower them more in the process. And new technologies can deliver faster service, greater choice and keener pricing. 14  Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort intended to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration which includes leaders in finance, banking, IoT, supply chain, manufacturing and technology.