The story of FinTech regulation is still unfolding but let me highlight three areas where good progress has been made in the last 10 years: setting standards for distributed ledgers; making cloud computing services safer; and dealing with artificial intelligence. Setting standards for distributed ledgers Experiments in applying distributed ledger technology to financial services began about 15 years ago and gathered pace from about 2018 onwards. The early days were characterised by both hype and fear. Popular imagination and regulatory concerns were focused on so-called crypto currencies or assets – essentially crypto tokens which assumed a life of their own as means of payments or investment assets outside the distributed ledger. But the euphoria did not last long. Crypto tokens failed to achieve scale as more people realised that they did not have the properties of either currencies or assets. Today, crypto tokens are confined to specific purposes and limited ecosystems. But after several false starts and failed use cases, the underlying distributed ledger technology or DLT started making significant inroads in the financial industry. Essentially, DLT made financial transactions and processes more efficient, more transparent, less risky, less costly. The three areas that saw the biggest transformations were in compliance, trade finance verification, and cross-border payments. As DLT systems became more pervasive, they began to assume properties of critical infrastructure with systemic implications. There were information security-related risks as well as operational risks associated with interoperability across multiple platforms.

Fixing the Fault Lines of the Global Financial Crisis Let me begin with the regulatory and supervisory responses to the Global Financial Crisis. The advances over the last 20 years can be broken down into three broad phases. The era of regulatory reform (2008 to 2016) The first eight years following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 saw the most wide-ranging set of reforms ever in the history of financial regulation. The destruction that the Global Financial Crisis had unleashed on our economies and societies galvanised action on an unprecedented scale. The Global Financial Crisis revealed some deep fault lines in the financial system that had been masked by fortuitous growth. Many financial institutions had leveraged themselves to the hilt – some of them by as much as 40 dollars of debt to 1 dollar of equity – unthinkable these days. Many banks had severe mismatches in liquidity. An opaque OTC derivatives market led to rapid contagion when liquidity suddenly dried up. Moral hazard grew as some financial institutions were seen as too-big-to-fail. 1/9  BIS central bankers' speeches  The Financial Stability Board, or FSB, was strengthened and tasked to oversee reforms to address each of these vulnerabilities. The way the international regulatory community came together and forged a consensus on the necessary reforms was exemplary. Between 2008 and 2016, the FSB, working closely with the Basel Committee, IOSCO, and other standard-setting bodies, put in place the basic building blocks for a new regulatory architecture that continues to serve us today.