Payments are vital to any real economy and in total nearly 40 billion payments were made in the UK in 2018.4 They are also at the heart of the financial system. This makes London the perfect location for a payments conference, which is focused on “thriving in a hyper-connected world”. Payments are innovating, fast. From the infrastructure and the messages that support each transaction, to new players entering the market and consumers seeking new ways to pay for goods and services. Future of Finance, Future of Payments  While the core mission for the Bank of England is maintaining monetary and financial stability, we also seek to enable innovation and empower competition in the financial system. To support our forward looking and dynamic approach we recently commissioned and responded to the Future of Finance report.5 It considered how financial services might evolve over the next decade, and what this could mean for each of us: for users, the system and the Bank itself. The report highlighted that a new economy and new demographics demand a new financial system. This system must be resilient, fair and dynamic. We have prioritised five areas of work: we are enhancing the payments system for the digital age; we will champion a platform to boost access to finance for small businesses; we will support the transition to a carbon-neutral economy; we will develop a world-class regtech and data strategy; and we will facilitate firms’ use of technology.

1  https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2019/victoria-cleland-national-inclusion-week-launch-event-at-house-of-lords https://files.londonandpartners.com/business/resources/london-fintech-scene-2017.pdf 3 https://www.innovatefinance.com/news/uk-fintech-investment-flying-high-in-h1-2019/ 4 https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/system/files/Summary-UK-Payment-Markets-2018.pdf 5 https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/report/2019/future-of-finance 2  2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  2  Today, I will focus on how the Bank will support a more resilient, innovative and competitive payments system for UK households and businesses: we have a vision that payments will become cheaper, instantaneous and more seamless, including across borders. At the heart of this is the UK’s Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) service which settles around £ of payments each working day, close to a third of the UK’s annual GDP. Not much business can be done without it, and most consumers are ultimately reliant on it. I will tell you shortly about our leading-edge work to renew this service, but this is not all we are doing. We are also pursuing a number of even more far-reaching strands which together have the potential to transform the current payments landscape. I want to share a few of these with you today. First, cross border payment is for many a long standing frustration - often badged as slow; inefficient and expensive for both financial institutions and end users. In 2018 we published a summary of our joint collaboration with the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bank of Canada to explore opportunities to make cross-border payments more efficient. But we want to take this further and play a leading role in supporting effective change in this area.