With the vast amount of data available such as those from new payment ecosystem and digital transactions, banks can better analyze business conditions and make more accurate forecast of customers’ credit demand and credit risks, resulting in improved risk management model. Additionally, emergence of new data will unlock new hedging products, especially in the insurance industry. Furthermore, advancements in technologies like artificial intelligence, biometrics, and blockchains can help safeguard financial information, improve identity verification, and reduce the number and magnitude of financial frauds. These developments will contribute to safer environment for both service providers and customers. 4-7  On inclusivity front, expanding fintech universe and advent of new and diverse platforms can improve financial access of customers, especially those who have been underserved by the current financial system. As different individuals have different levels of affordability and financial requirements, the ever-expanding fintech universe can offer wideranging choices and solutions needed to fulfill their different needs. Digitization of financial services and emergence of new platforms can improve financial services through online access and smartphone applications, which benefit customers both in cities and in remote areas. Fintech applications will also help with cross-border transactions for small businesses and enable fast and cheap remittance transfers for immigrant workers, thus creating opportunities and improving the quality of life of many whom might have been underserved. Meanwhile, information-based lending can help small businesses without adequate collateral gain access to funding at a fair price.

Secondly, monetary union still has a long way to go to achieve sounder governance that will reduce the union’s vulnerability to shocks, provide for better coordination of its economic policies and promote the reforms needed to encourage and to be able to sustain long-term growth. 3/7  The role of monetary policy I shall first address the role that monetary policy has played and is continuing to play in the recovery. The confluence of the financial and sovereign crises in a European monetary union whose institutional architecture was incomplete meant that the ECB had to assume a pivotal role in the economic policy response. Initial measures took the form of a gradual reduction in interest rates and the granting of practically unlimited amounts of liquidity to banking systems, at increasingly longer maturities, with greater flexibility in the attendant collateral policies. In 2012, amid a second recession in the euro area and financial turmoil, the possibility of purchasing the public debt of countries subject to financial pressures was introduced. While this possibility was not actually activated, it contributed to staving off the threat of the single currency breaking up. Yet by mid-2014, and despite the fact that the most acute episodes of the crisis had been overcome, the euro area was immersed in a scenario of low growth and deflation risks in which various external and internal factors were at play. On the external front, the weakness of global growth and the collapse of commodities prices accentuated the downside pressures of producer prices.