samchain/econo-pairs-v1 huggingface dataset:
Caleb M Fundanga: Bringing new levels of efficiency to the Zambian banking sector through technological innovation Speech by Dr Caleb M Fundanga, Governor of the Bank of Zambia, at the launch of the Zanaco bill muster, Lusaka, 27 June 2006. *  *  *  •  Managing Director – Zambia National Commercial Bank Plc  •  Senior management staff from Zanaco present  •  Members of the press  •  Invited guests  •  Ladies and gentlemen  It is my honour and privilege to be invited to officiate at this breakfast press briefing on the launch of the Zanaco bill muster product. I am informed that the Zanaco bill muster is Zanaco’s latest product innovation. The product will enable the bank’s customers to pay their utility bills at any Zanaco branch and utility companies will receive their collection details electronically online in real time. I am further informed that the new product will make it possible for the bank’s customers to pay for their utility bills by filling in a form instructing the bank through internet banking. The product we are launching today is indeed a positive development as it should bring new levels of efficiency to the banking sector and set a precedence for other players on the market to emulate. At Bank of Zambia, we sincerely support this type of innovation, especially if such a product helps in reducing the cumbersome use of paper and tedious work of manual transmission of payment instructions.

Ladies and gentlemen, you will agree with me that automation of processes brings in some efficiency which should translate into effective utilisation of resources. Instead of spending time processing bulk payments, employees will have time to concentrate on other more important assignments, such as deposit mobilisation, credit portfolio growth and administration, all of which are important for the wellbeing of an institution in terms of profits, enhanced shareholder value and growth of the economy at large. The world is changing in terms of technological advancement and new methods of doing business are being developed every day. As a country and through innovations like the product we are launching today, we need to constantly keep up with these developments. Ladies and gentlemen, as you are aware the government continues to give tax and other incentives for institutions and individuals importing computers and computer parts. This is deliberate. It is aimed at stimulating economic growth and as such we all have no excuse for not taking advantage of this development. We expect all commercial banks in Zambia to take full advantage of this for the benefit of the Zambian people through improved service delivery. In this connection, I would like to take this opportunity to call on Zambia National Commercial Bank Plc, as a national bank, to take the lead in responding to our call and indeed government’s call to reduce lending interest rates further.
The linkages to the United Kingdom from such a disorderly outcome would be threefold. First, and most obviously, almost half our exports go the euro area, so weak growth there has a rather direct spillover on to us. Second, although UK banks’ exposures to governments, households and businesses in the affected countries are generally manageable, they do have exposures to, and get finance from, euro-area banks which are more heavily exposed. A disorderly outcome in the euro area could then result in a tightening of the availability of funds to UK banks as a result of this interconnectedness and thus also in the credit extended to UK households and businesses. Third, a bad outcome would probably knock confidence and lead UK households and businesses to hunker down and postpone spending. There is little that the Monetary Policy Committee – or, indeed, the Government – can do to influence the outcome of events beyond our shores. In particular, it would make little sense to set the level of asset purchases so as to try to counteract an extreme event whose likelihood, timing and magnitude we have no realistic way of assessing. The latest extension of our asset purchase programme has proved controversial in some quarters. Some commentators have questioned its likely effectiveness in stimulating demand. Others have focussed on the undesirable distributional consequences.

This, coupled with the higher remittance cost of 4.5% in Kota Kinabalu compared to other parts of Malaysia presents a unique opportunity to leverage on the Greenback project, to support the financial needs and goals of foreign workers here in Sabah; to increase the development impact of remittances to our neighbouring countries; and importantly, to make remittances generally more efficient for businesses and the population of Sabah itself. Even though this is the second champion city in Malaysia, we are not only looking to replicate our experience in Johor Bahru. Indeed, we acknowledge the different challenges and opportunities presented in Sabah, which is why an important and distinct focus for Greenback Kota Kinabalu will be the wider use of technology to deliver remittance solutions in Sabah. Here in Sabah, people still often need to travel a great distance to send money home. This is 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  costly, cumbersome and at times, risky – made even more challenging by Sabah’s geography and remoteness of some parts of the state. Technology offers new possibilities to overcome these difficulties, while significantly improving user convenience. Although remittances through electronic channels is not new, the take-up rate of electronic remittances has been relatively slow. In 2017, the share of electronic remittances accounted for only 12% of total remittances. This in turn has limited the potential to make remittance services much more efficient and accessible to our communities, including here in Sabah.
Philipp M Hildebrand: The role of central banks in fostering economic development Speech by Mr Philipp M Hildebrand, Vice-Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the Inaugural Meeting of the Africa Emerging Markets Forum, Gerzensee, 1 October 2007. The speaker gratefully acknowledges the valuable assistance provided by Raphael Auer, Martin Brown and Werner Hermann in preparing this speech. * 1. *  *  Introduction  On behalf of my Governing Board colleagues, let me warmly welcome you to the SNB Study Center Gerzensee! It is an honour and a privilege for the Swiss National Bank to host the Inaugural Meeting of the Emerging Markets Forum for Africa. I trust you are well rested this morning. By now, you will have noted that the Study Center Gerzensee is not a five star hotel. Compared to other conference centres, the service provided here is modest. We like to think that we emphasise substance rather than style. We try to create an atmosphere conducive to learning. The Center serves multiple purposes. It is here, for example, that we organise advanced courses for selected central bank professionals from all over the world. According to the traditional policy of the Center, only one participant per country is allowed in each Central Bankers Course. In the 25 years since the creation of the Center, more than 300 participants from African central banks have attended these courses.

BIS Review 110/2007  3  Figure 3: Share of Non-Cash Money in Africa (in%) 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 South Africa  Northern Africa (median)  Sub-Saharan w/o SA (median)  How can central banks foster the further development of safe and efficient payment instruments in Africa? First and foremost, central banks must take a leading role in the development, operation and oversight of necessary infrastructure, such as interbank and retail payment systems. In doing so, it would seem natural to take advantage of international knowledge and expertise. As financial sector regulators, central banks can further create a market environment which encourages the entry of new service providers, as well as the development of innovative payment instruments, such as SMS-banking and mobile-banking. As an oversight authority, it is then the task of the central bank to ensure that new payment services adhere to the security requirement desired by businesses, households and financial institutions. 4. Financial sector development  Third, let’s take a brief look at financial sector development. An efficient and deep financial sector provides enterprises with debt and equity to finance their growth, thus spurring economic activity. At the same time a deep financial sector can provide households with savings and credit products to smooth their consumption patterns, again increasing their return from economic activity, and reducing poverty. To what extent have financial sectors grown and become more efficient in Africa in recent years?
The second trade-off is the approach to simplification. There are two broad approaches we can follow: the first is what we have called a ‘streamlined’ approach, while the second is what we have called a ‘focused’ approach – you can tell from this that the PRA is not a marketing agency. You can think of the ‘streamlined’ approach as retaining most of the chapters of our Rulebook, but simplifying the text within them. On the other hand, you can think of the ‘focused’ approach as completely removing whole chapters from our Rulebook. For example, under a streamlined approach we could perhaps simplify our Pillar 2 capital requirements, whereas under a focused approach we might get rid of them altogether. How far we go in either direction will partly depend on how broad the scope of the framework is. This then brings me to what I think is the third key trade-off: the strength of the framework. The more focused an approach we take – that is, the more requirements we completely remove – the more likely it is that the calibration of the remaining requirements may need to be increased to ensure that the overall framework remains strong. This indeed is the approach that has been taken by several other jurisdictions, such as the US and Switzerland. By how much calibrations might need to adjust would in turn depend on what requirements had been removed, what if any requirements had replaced them, and what requirements had remained in place.

With more than 25 million members and an average CET1 ratio of more than 26%, the building society sector was well placed to weather the storm from a financial resilience perspective, extending more than £ billion of new loans in 2020 and offering a peak of more than 300,000 payment deferrals to customers in financial difficulty. From an operational perspective, societies also adapted quickly to lockdowns and home-working arrangements, with almost all society branches continuing to serve their members through the pandemic. But the disruption caused by Covid-19 has shown why it is critically important for firms to identify the key services they provide and invest in their resilience. Societies – like all of 1/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  us – have witnessed an acceleration in technology innovation over the last year. Continuing to build on these developments and incorporating them into operating models will be important, both for the sector’s operational resilience, but also for serving the evolving needs of the sector’s members. As we sit here today, the outlook looks better than we might have expected a year ago. But a considerable amount of uncertainty remains, not least as many of the bridging measures put in place by the authorities begin to roll off. Though it may now look less likely, additional financial and operational pressures may still be on the horizon, and we will be monitoring that closely.
Lending only against self-liquidating commercial paper does nothing to prevent an acceleration in prices, as the central bank’s balance sheet simply accommodates any increase in credit driven by a rising general price level. As central banks around the world came to concentrate on preserving stability in the value of their money in terms of goods and services, they put the Real Bills Doctrine in the dustbin of ideas. Wind forward a hundred years. The buzzword is “macroprudential”. And the talk is of how to lean against speculative bubbles or tame the credit cycle; of how to contain contagion and systemic crises; of the role of central bank liquidity facilities; and of how to give banking supervision a more systemic perspective.1 It is striking that those concerns are not so distant from those of the framers of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. Much is said about “missing  1  See, for example, “Enhancing Financial Stability and Resilience: Macroprudential Policy, Tools and Systems for the Future, Group of 30, 2010. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  instruments”. It has been a mistake for central bankers, and the legislators to whom they are accountable, to focus at different points of their history on only one of either the stability-threatening excesses of (real) credit cycles or, alternatively, inflation. In the language of the Bank of England’s 1991 statement of Core Purposes, central banks need a mandate for both monetary stability and financial stability.

If the FPC requires lenders to carry higher capital, liquidity or collateral, that will affect credit conditions and so the outlook for aggregate demand and inflation. In the other direction, monetary policy settings plainly affect asset prices, and so influence credit conditions through the net worth of borrowers and lenders. Also, it seems to me plausible that they affect risk-seeking behaviour,11 especially in a world in which many investment managers have nominal return targets. Given those two-way interactions, some commentators worry about co-ordination problems from having separate monetary policy and macroprudential committees with different objectives. 9  “Reforming the International Financial System”, Mark Carney, Bank of Canada 2009. 10  “The role of margin requirements and haircuts in procyclicality”, CGFS Paper No.36, Bank for International Settlements. 11  See, for example, De Nicolo, Dell’Ariccia, Laeven and Valencia, “Monetary Policy and Bank Risk Taking”, IMF, 2010. BIS central bankers’ speeches  9  As I have already explained in the context of having distinctive machinery for microsuperivsion, the UK has favoured having a separate macroprudential committee in order to ensure that the stability of the financial system is not neglected. The “macro” in macroprudential is not synonymous with macroeconomic but, as I have said, points us towards thinking of the financial system as a system. The members of the FPC need a knowledge base that, while overlapping, is different from that of the MPC. They need to know about the microstructure of the capital markets as well as about cyclical credit conditions.
The Federal Reserve is independent from politics and the national government but is subject to oversight by Congress, which has set our dual mandate to promote maximum sustainable employment and price stability. The Federal Reserve is structured to ensure that the economic needs of people and businesses in every part of our country are fully considered in our policy deliberations. What I learn in my visit to Staten Island today is an important input to our policymaking process. As New York Fed president I try to get out of my New York City office as much as I can to get a sense of regional economic conditions across what is known as the second Federal Reserve District. I’ve traveled throughout New York, New Jersey and Puerto Rico in recent years and plan to visit Fairfield County, upstate New York and Queens later this year. These visits give me the opportunity to explain what the Federal Reserve is doing and to get your thoughts about the state of our economy and the challenges that you face. Today, I will focus on the economic outlook regionally and nationally. After that, I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have about what the Fed does, and about the economic outlook. As always, my views are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the FOMC or the Federal Reserve System.

In fact, real gross domestic product (GDP) grew just 1.7 percent in 2012, below the 2.2 percent rate of the preceding two years. This lackluster and disappointing performance masks the fact that the underlying conditions that support growth have been gradually improving. However, in the near-term, this improvement in fundamentals is being offset by federal tax increases and spending cuts, which economists call “fiscal drag.” The most obvious example of this is the end of the partial payroll tax holiday at the beginning of this year. This reduced the take-home pay for all those that pay into the Social Security system. In a recent speech to the Economic Club of New York, I discussed a number of areas where economic fundamentals have improved. Here, let me concentrate instead on some areas of the economy where the impact of this improvement in fundamentals has been most evident: consumer spending, the housing market, and investment in equipment and software. Despite the increase in payroll taxes and in high-income tax rates, real – that is, inflationadjusted – personal consumption expenditures rose solidly in January and February. As has been the case for some time, the growth of consumer spending has been led by purchases of durable goods. Car and light truck sales in the first quarter were at the highest pace since the fourth quarter of 2007. This growth in consumer spending probably is due, in part, to improvements in labor market conditions, household balance sheets and household access to credit.
We assume that January’s indicators on consumer lending recovery will probably exceed those on income recovery, and if any signs of future overheating emerge, we may start already this year to increase buffers for newly issued consumer loans in order to prevent an inadequate rise in households’ debt load as compared to income growth. I would like to especially emphasise once again the fact that the decision to release buffers, rather than extend the regulatory easing is a matter of principle. Macroprudential buffers were introduced in the regulation not so long ago, and they are part of our countercyclical policy. What does this mean? This means that these capital buffers are accumulated when the environment 2/7  BIS central bankers' speeches  is favourable and are released to be used in crisis periods. Today, we are facing exactly such a situation. In contrast to regulatory easing, macroprudential policy does not camouflage problems, yet delivers more comfort to banks. The second topic I would like to dwell on is that we are going to return to our plan for curtailing irrevocable credit lines for systemically important banks. We announced this policy before the pandemic, but in spring 2020, amid all that turbulence in the market, we temporarily eased the requirements for systemically important banks’ compliance with the liquidity coverage ratio and made irrevocable credit lines granted by the Bank of Russia more affordable, postponing the termination of this instrument.

On our side of the Channel, our collective response to Brexit may possibly be a further integration of Europe, with the new and promising Commission led by Ursula von der Leyen, rather than isolationism or paralysis. Europe should build on its most valuable assets: the euro, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, the single market and its shared social and environmental model. II. Making the digital leap with lucidity Let me now turn to our shared common challenges. Digitalisation is shaking up the way we live and consume, opening up a world of possibilities for corporates and customers alike. Worldwide, it clearly represents both an opportunity and a challenge for banks, as well as for supervisors. New players are becoming increasingly important. Fintechs do not have the capital resources to disrupt incumbent banks and can even be acquired by them. By contrast, Bigtechs do have the potential to fundamentally redefine financial intermediation: they have strong brand recognition, a 1/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  worldwide customer base and privileged access to cutting-edge technologies. This new situation is a major challenge for regulators and supervisors. Of course, financial regulation should remain technologically neutral: the basic principle “same activity, same rules” must apply. This is a good thing for the level playing field. However, beyond traditional financial regulation, international cooperation should be developed in four areas, four cornerstones of the regulation of digital finance. First, cybersecurity is a sine qua non for a reliable and sustainable digital future.
However, the banks could not extend the loans from their US counterparties, possibly because the money market funds were no longer willing to buy their securities. And so a liquidity crisis arose.4 Now, unfortunately, we do not know exactly how large a proportion of their borrowing in dollars the Swedish banks use for each of these three purposes – investing in liquid dollar assets, exchanging into Swedish kronor, and lending directly to customers. However, the proportion of currency swaps probably lies somewhere around half of the total dollar borrowing, occasionally perhaps even higher. It can differ quite widely between different banks, and variations over time can also be significant. Here we need better data than are currently available. But let us assume that the total dollar borrowing in the form of issued securities for the four major banks is around SEK 900 billion, and that half of this amount is used for lending to companies. This would put the lending potentially linked with a liquidity risk in the magnitude of SEK 450 billion. 3  Naturally, a counterparty risk may exist, should the bank on the other end of the currency swap have problems in accepting kronor against dollars according to contract. However, in this situation, it would not have its loan repaid either. 4  The Swedish banks also borrowed large amounts of euros which were then lent to companies and households in the Baltic countries. Of course, in retrospect, this was not particularly well thought-out, and led to major problems for the banks involved.

As the Swedish banks have grown so rapidly in recent decades, mostly by expanding overseas, it would not be out of place to ask whether they have become too large for Sweden. Is there, perhaps, a limit for how large a banking system can be in relation to the total production capacity and fiscal capacity of one country? The risks for society may, quite simply, become too high. Experiences from Iceland and Ireland during the last crisis undeniably suggest this. And the Swedish banks are certainly large. The combined balance sheet totals of the major banks are equivalent to slightly more than four times GDP (Figure 6, left-hand diagram). This multiple is among the highest in Europe, in the same order of magnitude as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands (prior to the crisis, Iceland was in ninth place). However, I think that we should perhaps be cautious in assessing the risks in a banking system merely on the basis of the size of its balance sheets. For example, imagine that Nordea moved its head office from Stockholm to Helsinki, suddenly becoming a Finnish bank. This would take Sweden below the European average (Figure 6, right-hand diagram). Would the level of risk in the Swedish banking system then have decreased considerably? I don’t think so. The risks in a large banking system have many other dimensions than just balance sheet total in relation to GDP. Large banking systems can be associated with low risks and small banking systems can be associated with high risks.