overall trade volume may decline, effecting a necessary correction of current account deficit of the country ’ s economy and putting foreign currency supply / demand factors in a more stable balance. • thirdly, it is necessary to recover stable paces of public deposit growth in the banking sector. only in this way, the coverage of an increasing clientele with banking products and at more beneficial costs will be enabled. i repeat, the banking sector ’ s position concerning liquidity indicators and business capitalization is good and its constant surveillance is a priority of the bank of albania. we are confident that the last decision of the people ’ s assembly of albania, which adopted an increase of the whole value of deposit insurance to all 2. 5 million, will impact on a faster return of withdrawn deposits to the banking system. the current level of deposit insurance, likewise that of the european countries, fully and forever guarantees the savings of the major part of albanian households. at present there are no objective reasons for the people to be concerned about the insurance of their savings held at banks. every reluctance on putting savings at banks would unnecessarily increase the value of the missing income, due to non - benefiting of interests and other banking services. i underline that the albanian banking sector is the best place, where our households should place their savings, thus increasing their values. • fourth, returning of deposits to the system is necessary also for enabling a better financial performance of the banking sector, in terms of financial soundness. during the current year, the banking activity is expected to be less profitable, as a result of reduced lending and increased costs, in order to add deposits and provisioning for covering bad loans. it is important that the albanian banking sector, after some years of a satisfactory profit, has mostly utilized it for firming up the banking sector ’ s capital. moreover, through a specific regulatory act, the bank of albania has requested from the banking sector not to allocate the 2008 profit, in the form of dividend. in this way, banking activity capitalization is further strengthened, providing more guarantees for the financial soundness of the banking sector. recently the bank of albania has been carrying out consecutive tests, to find out how the banking sector would react, if faced with ever more pessimistic circumstances. analyses obtained from numerous stresstests made on the whole system and on individual banks reveal that neither the banking system in general, nor any bank of systemic importance in particular have been affected relative to

andrew bailey : innovation to serve the public interest speech by mr andrew bailey, governor of the bank of england, at the city uk annual conference, 15 june 2021. * * * it ’ s a pleasure to be participating in the city uk annual conference. amongst the themes you have chosen, i will focus on innovation, and how we think about and assist innovation as public policy makers. in doing so, i will draw on our work on payments and digital currency, including an important paper on the latter that we published last week. to cut to the end briefly, i believe that as public policy makers we have to be clear on the rules of the road that innovation needs to follow to serve the public interest, and in doing so be clear that innovation can rightly challenge those rules and cause them to adapt. but, what we cannot have is a world where innovation gets a free pass to ignore the public interest. the odds of such an approach not ending well are too high. it follows that as public policy makers we need to provide a lead in setting out these rules of the road and be prepared to think openly about how they can be fitted to changing circumstances. this requires early engagement, something we are seeking to do on digital currency. playing catch up with public policy is not a recipe for success. there will inevitably be elements of tough love in such a process, and some disappointed ambitions, but i am confident that out of it will come a robust form of innovation. i hope also that laying out the principles of public interest and how they should be put into practice in the context of new innovation will help to deal with another difficult and perennial challenge of financial regulation. it is in the nature of innovation – and a good thing – that while some ideas succeed, many fall by the wayside. how many people remember visi on, topview and gem? i have to admit i did not until i did some research for today. in the mid - 1980s, they were rivals to windows for the personal computer software market. more precisely, they were briefly rivals, but the rest as they say is history, as were these three rivals. in our world of finance, things can be more complicated, because dealing with failures itself raises public policy issues. there are quite often suggestions that central banks and financial regulators are anti - innovation and lukewarm on competition, because the results will at times be messy as the winners emerge and the losers fall by the wayside. we are not anti - innovation