account of the need to balance opportunities and risks. before announcing the winners, i wish to thank all of you who answered this call for proposals and who took up this shared challenge. special thanks go to the members of the panel who assessed the projects, for their commitment to carrying out a difficult task with great speed and professionalism, and to all our colleagues in the bank of italy who enabled us to reach our goals in just a few short months. i wish you every success in your future endeavours and hope that cooperation between the supervisory authorities, fintech companies, supervised intermediaries and research centres can continue to make progress and to be intensified over time. 1 / 1 bis central bankers'speeches

can also feed into the way we perform our roles, and in particular our role as service provider. from the first - generation of the target system twenty years ago, the eurosystem has demonstrated a strong political will to foster innovation and support capital markets integration and development, through the provision of clearing and settlement services in central bank money for financial intermediaries. these services, namely t2 and t2s, have established themselves as the backbone of the financial market infrastructures for the euro. more recently, the eurosystem has developed its vision 2020 program comprising : tips, an instant payment solution, launched in november 2018 to settle instant payments ; the t2 - t2s consolidation to optimize and enhance liquidity management and cash and securities services planned for 2021 ; last but not least, the ecms ( european collateral management system ) planned to be launched in 2022, and designed to provide a unified platform for the management of standard monetary policy operations and the associated collateral. these are european successes and ambition. nevertheless, we have to address new challenges. in the recent years, there has been a strong demand for quick and safe cross - border payment solutions, available 24 / 7, enabling smooth exchanges. in europe, various domestic instant payment solutions have emerged in a certain number of countries, available 24 / 7, settling retail payment orders up to 15 000 euros in less than 15 seconds. however, cross - border payment solutions are still costly for end users, slow and unsafe across the world, in particular in emerging countries. regarding the wholesale infrastructures, they still present various shortcomings, as market infrastructures are not interoperable around the world. the correspondent banking model is often considered as the only solution to transfer money across borders, but it is also costly, and lacks traceability and efficiency. the perimeter of the aml / ctf and kyc checks is in some cases uncertain for the counterparties of a payment order. the tokenisation of financial assets combined with the recourse to blockchain - based solutions and more broadly distributed ledger technologies to store and transfer those assets could help answering market ’ s demands. at the same time, they could help remedy the current limits of the existing wholesale market infrastructures by exploring new avenues. the implementation of those innovations could have an important impact on the financial industry in particular to facilitate gross and simultaneous delivery - versus - payment processes, crosscurrency settlement, resilience, and recovery from operational incidents. the