Because new financial technologies are presenting significant opportunities, but also enormous challenges for central banks and financial regulators. 1/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  They hold out the promise for achieving broader and more inclusive access to financial services, characterised by greater speed and convenience, and lower costs. The emergence of new financial institutions and multiple payment systems could dramatically improve financial intermediation and reduce concentration risks. Greater access to data also carries tremendous value for better surveillance and policymaking. However, these developments also carry with them new risks and challenges – from more interconnected systems through which risks can transmit in and across organisations and financial systems; to concerns associated with privacy, misinformation, security and criminal abuse. Moreover, as financial systems continue to undergo major technological transformations, their resilience remains largely untested during periods of crisis. Technological disruptions will continue to push the limits of our ability to identify and pre-empt risks. This will also increasingly place authorities who are responsible for financial stability, at odds with a desire to encourage and not stifle innovation. Managing this balance will require us to approach governance, risk and controls with fresh lenses. For Bank Negara Malaysia, this has entailed a number of strategic imperatives. The first has been a sharper focus on strengthening regulation and supervision to promote resilience. The Bank recently published new standards on risk management in technology for financial institutions and strengthened our expectations on the management of outsourcing risks by firms.

Jessica Chew Cheng Lian: Evolving governance, risk and control in the digital age Welcoming remarks by Jessica Chew Cheng Lian, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia (Bank Negara Malaysia), at the Conference on “Governance, Risk and Control in the Era of Disruption”, Kuala Lumpur, 9 December 2019. * * * Dr. Firas Raad, World Bank’s Country Manager for Malaysia, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen. Good morning and welcome to Sasana Kijang. Bank Negara Malaysia is delighted to host this Conference on Governance, Risk and Controls in the Era of Disruption. Let me begin by sincerely thanking our joint host, the World Bank Group for working with us to put together a rich programme that speaks directly to issues that I am sure are keeping at least some of us awake at night. In the year 2000, the English author and academic, Sir Malcolm Bradbury wrote this: “We no longer live in the Age of Reason. We don’t have reason, we have computation. We don’t have a tree of knowledge, we have an information superhighway. We don’t have real intelligence, we have artificial intelligence. We no longer pursue truth, we seek data and signals. We no longer have philosophers, we have thinking pragmatists. We no longer have morals, we have lifestyles.” This rather grim view of the world was written almost two decades ago. Since then, the extent of technological change and disruption that has come to define our world gives these words a significance that few could have imagined.