in payments, so that money continues to serve europeans well ”. money, in whatever form it takes, serves as ; a unit of account providing a common measure of the value of goods and services ; a store of value which people use to transfer purchasing power from the present to the future ; and, most importantly in terms of our focus here today, as a medium of exchange ( or means of payment ) to facilitate trade and transactions. payment systems cover a wide range of transactions at all levels of the nancial system. retail payments systems apply to consumer and business instruments such as credit transfers, direct debits, credit or debit cards, cash and cheques. while wholesale systems handle the clearing level of nancial institutions such as interbank clearing or card payment schemes, up to settlement in central bank money. in terms of retail payments in ireland, ecb survey data from 2019 illustrates that 57 per cent of payments ( in terms of value, made either person to person or at point of sale ) were made by cash, while card payments accounted for a third. 3 the average person in ireland makes almost two such payments a day ( 1. 90 ) with an average value per payment of just over €30. 4 and i ’ ll come back shortly to how this has evolved with the pandemic. money and payment systems are at the core of the monetary system. the monetary system is founded on trust, trust placed by consumers, businesses and industry in the public good of money, the institutions that provide it and the payment systems that deliver it. maintaining trust in the monetary system is a rst - order public interest. 5 it is important to bear this in mind as we look to the evolution of payments into the future. the evolving landscape of payments over the last number of years, two key trends have been shaping the payments landscape ; speed and innovation. as our worlds have become increasingly digitalised, the expectation of speed, of instant delivery and removal of cross border frictions to payments has grown ever stronger. in response, there has been remarkable innovation in service offerings by rms, new and old, and indeed the pandemic served to accelerate the use of digital payments. [ refer to slide : use of electronic payment instruments in the euro area ] against this backdrop we have seen the emergence of new technologies and processes to meet this demand, both from existing providers and an explosion of new rms – ntech, big tech and start - ups. the e - money and payment services directive

postwar recoveries ( although, as i will discuss later, not with the one in the early 1990s ), when employment surged. similarly, with employment growth until recently having been wanting, the unemployment rate peaked more than a year and a half after the recession ended and has not yet fallen below its level at the time designated by the national bureau of economic research as the economic trough. and quite possibly the unemployment rate has been understating the amount of slack in the labor market because labor - force participation has been unusually weak, perhaps reflecting an assessment on the part of many households that job availability would be poor for those actually in the labor market. the output growth that largely defines the recovery resulted from impressive growth in labor productivity. during the two years of falling employment, productivity in the nonfarm business sector rose about 5 percent per year. part of this spectacular performance is typical. one expects productivity to rise quickly during the early stages of a recovery ; as utilization rates rise, companies find more for their workers to do. part of the growth of labor productivity may have to do with unusual, and transitory, hesitation on the part of businesses to hire, a topic to which i will return. happily, however, the recent increases appear to have an important structural component as well. whereas most recessions since world war ii had no productivity growth or had outright declines, productivity during this past recession rose at a rate of more than 2 percent. and this growth was a continuation of the rapid gains that characterized the latter half of the 1990s. the favorable performance of productivity likely is related to another unusual feature of this recovery : the behavior of prices. productivity growth in the years leading up to the business - cycle peak in early 2001 was one factor that contributed to keeping inflation low. core prices for personal consumption expenditures advanced at an average annual rate of less than 2 percent over the two years preceding the peak - despite unemployment rates down around 4 percent. moreover, prices decelerated during the recovery. at this time last year we observed core pce inflation in the vicinity of 1 percent. in fact, inflation was so low, especially once known biases in the price indexes are taken into account, that for several months the fomc was concerned more about the possibility of “ inflation becoming undesirably low ” than about the risk of a rise in inflation. these low rates of inflation coming into the recession and continuing into the recovery were one reason why the federal reserve responded so aggressively to the downturn