markets, hampering their development ; and at times it risked undermining the implementation of monetary policy. we have therefore over the past two years set ourselves to find ways of draining this liquidity on a permanent basis. the key to doing so was the steps taken by the national treasury, starting in september 2002, to pay off the balance on the gfecra, principally by issuing the sarb with bonds. we were then able to sell these bonds, either directly or by switching into forthcoming maturing issues, and so drain the excess liquidity on a permanent basis. at the same time, other factors helped us along the way - notably, the steady increase in notes and coins in circulation, and the recovery in the rand, which enabled us to start generating profits on our oversold forward book. the result is that, by the end of last year, we were able to pension off the use of special money market swaps with deposits - which had amounted to over r50 billion at peak - and had effectively completed the task of draining the liquidity surplus on a permanent basis. this episode is a fascinating story of bringing liquidity management back from a distorted position to normalcy. thus here, too, there has been a steady process of bringing our structures and process back to normalcy. the process of normalisation is a feature of many areas of our efforts over recent years. i hope i have been able to show that it has been worth the effort, for the benefits it brings in terms of better and more sustainable economic performance for the country as a whole. i hope i have also been able to show that these benefits are now beginning to come through in substantive form, but that there is much more yet to be gained from the heavy lifting that has been done in recent years. that is why we will stick to the task.

on the other hand, new threats can be introduced through fintech - inspired innovations. loans can be issued in a matter of minutes using, for example, new scoring techniques by fintech platforms. they leverage social media and apply new techniques such as network analysis, sentiment analysis and natural language processing to unstructured data sources to assess default risks differently. however, in applying new artificial intelligence and machine - learning techniques, concerns arise about the reliability, validity and transparency of the decision - making process. what goes on inside the so - called ‘ black box ’ of new computational learning algorithms? we have all heard about the significant failures of internet finance companies such as ezubao in china. ezubao had been set up as an online peer - to - peer lending scheme in july 2014. it attracted funds of about 50 billion yuan ( us $ 7. 6 billion ) from 900 000 investors. it ceased to trade in december 2015, just a year and a half later. 3 we have to be vigilant of the new threats that may arise as a result of the application of novel technologies. turning to other innovations such as crypto - assets, there are numerous examples over the last few years of exchanges being hacked and invested funds being lost. as has been reported to the japanese regulator, 5 966 bitcoins were stolen and hackers managed to steal 5 billion yen ( about us $ 44. 5 million ) of crypto - tokens. 4 we have recently seen increased attention by south korean and japanese regulators to this domain as a result of these ever - increasing cyber - incidents. with initial coin offerings, the lack of clarity and transparency, with numerous white papers attempting to raise funds quickly through token sales, is another area of concern. so while these new business models may bring benefits, their longevity may be challenged if financial, business and / or operational risks materialise. the provision of financial services is a heavily regulated industry. the main reason for this is not just the protection of consumers. as services and systems evolve and become more interconnected, the spillover effects of risks to the financial sector and ultimately to the real economy increase. we ’ ve seen these contagion issues during the global financial crisis. i would therefore encourage that our assessment of both the potential and the 3 gough neil, 1 february 2016, the new york times 4 https : / / cointelegraph. com / news / japanese - cryptocurrency - exchange - hacked - 59