3  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  3  Second, as well as renewing RTGS, we, alongside Pay.UK, are moving UK payment systems onto the ISO 20022 messaging standard.10 That should bring many benefits, including better interoperability between payment systems, lower entry costs and the possibility of innovative data services to users. We are also working closely with our international peers to promote the harmonisation of ISO20022 globally, which could increase efficiencies and facilitate easier and so cheaper cross-border payments. And third, as the Governor highlighted yesterday, we are opening up direct RTGS access to a broader range of firms. Five non-bank payment service providers now hold accounts in RTGS, and have seen benefits including faster transaction times and lower reduced individual transaction costs, and around twenty further firms are exploring the possibility of joining. Unbundling The evolution of payment systems is just one example of unbundling, the second area that I’m going to focus on today. Emerging business models can unbundle traditional financial services activities into individual core functions such as settling payments, performing maturity transformation and allocating capital. We are already seeing the benefits of unbundling – established and challenger banks alike are deploying sophisticated mobile apps that allow consumers to manage their finances, initiate payments and help with budgeting. Insurance startups are responding to the growth of the gig economy by offering highly personalised/tailored insurance products that combine traditional home and/or motor insurance with business coverage for temporary use.

As you heard from the Bank’s Governor, Mark Carney, yesterday, the Bank’s strategy is to enable innovation and empower competition, while ensuring monetary and financial stability.2 In practice the Bank is embracing fintech, and working to do as much as we can to ensure that it develops in ways that maximise the opportunities and minimise the risks for society, and that as such are entirely consistent with the defining theme of this year’s summit – “the value and purpose that fintech has to society”. The Fintech Hub one year on The vehicle we use to do all this is our Fintech Hub, which we launched one year ago.3 This team, which grew out of our award-winning Fintech Accelerator, sits at the heart of the Bank and leads our fintech strategy by bringing together expertise from all of Bank’s business areas. They have engaged extensively with the fintech sector to understand developments and apply these to support the next wave of innovation in finance. Examples of their work this year include: collaborating with HMT and the FCA to set out the UK’s approach to cryptoassets and distributed ledger technology in financial services4; examining challenges in cross-border payments with colleagues from the Bank of Canada and Monetary Authority of Singapore 5; exploring how  As set out by Mark Carney in his 2018 Mansion House Speech, “New Economy, New Finance, New Bank”, available at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2018/mark-carney-speech-at-the-lord-mayors-bankers-and-merchants-dinner-mansion-house. 2 “A Platform for Innovation”, available at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2019/mark-carney-speech-at-innovate-financeglobal-summit-2019.