An organisation’s purpose can be for the client; such as Amazon’s goal ‘To be earth’s most customer-centric company’; or the greater good, such as the World Bank’s mission to ‘End extreme poverty’, and the Bank of England’s to ‘Promote the good of the people of the United Kingdom by maintaining monetary and financial stability’. The leader’s job is to ensure that the purpose of their organisation is always present and anchors its goals, values, and strategy. Like diversity, purpose is not a “nice to have”. Evidence shows that purposeful companies have higher employee engagement, greater customer satisfaction, tighter supplier linkages and better environmental stewardship. The pay-offs to purposeful business are superior share price performance, better operational performance, lower costs of capital, smaller regulatory fines and greater resilience in the face of shocks. 10  Always remember that, as leaders, you will be stewards of the purpose of your organisations. In this sense, leadership is the acceptance of responsibility rather than the assumption of power. True leadership is not an end in itself but rather as a means to accomplishing a worthwhile goal. These are lessons that some in financial services have had to re-learn in recent years. An industry of the scale and importance of finance needs social capital as well as economic capital in order to operate, innovate and grow. To maintain social capital, finance ultimately needs to be seen as a vocation, an activity with high ethical standards, which in turn conveys certain responsibilities.

Even though the analysis of the cumulative impact and the interactions between regulations is still in its early days, vigilance is required to ensure that the implementation of reforms does not result in a reduction of financial activities, such as market making that are vital for preserving market liquidity, financing investments and firms and ultimately the real economy. The foreseen banking structures reform and European Financial Transactions Tax (EFTT) are cases in point. In both projects, an appropriate approach should strike the right balance between limiting risks associated with trading activities and the need to preserve financial activities that are useful if not essential to the development of the real economy. Doing so would be fully compliant with the overarching objectives of the Capital Markets Union. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Having better integrated markets within the European Union (EU) would also mean the emergence of more reciprocity issues as regards macroprudential policies. At the macro level, authorities should then closely review the potential additional vulnerabilities and risks attached to the CMU both at the domestic level and on a cross-border basis. Authorities will also have to strengthen their analytical framework and possibly complement their macroprudential instruments which are mainly bank-based at the current juncture. I will conclude with some remarks regarding longer term work, namely how to harmonize further domestic legal regimes and the institutional architecture. The Commission’s green paper has identified some areas for longer term work, including the need for further harmonization of insolvency regimes, securities laws and tax regimes.