and less than eur 400 million just three years ago in 2018! it is not my intention today to comment on these figures : i do, however, see in them the undeniable sign of a maturing of the french fintech ecosystem. and also the sign of a diversification : because at the same time as we are witnessing the first french fintech players grow, we are continuing to see a wealth of new projects, new ideas, new practices : in insurtech, fractional payments, the platformisation of services and the early stages of “ open finance ", to mention but a few examples. in the field of blockchain technology, the world has also considerably changed over the past year, with the rise of decentralised finance, the success of non - fungible tokens ( nft ), not to mention the first, sometimes spectacular, " clashes ” between these new ecosystems and regulatory authorities, in countries as different as china and the united states. 1 / 4 bis central bankers'speeches 2. faced with this changing world, how should we, as central banks and financial sector supervisors, position ourselves? first of all, to be relevant in a changing world, we need to be able to distinguish what does not change. and fundamentally, what does not change in the financial sector is the need for confidence. consumers of financial services need to have confidence : in the security of transactions, in the protection of their assets and in their freedom of choice. the players in the sector also need to have confidence : in each other, because they remain interdependent, in the rules of the game, i. e. in the regulatory conditions under which they can carry out their activity. central banks and supervisors clearly have a role to play in maintaining this confidence, in all the forms i have just mentioned. in this respect, i would like to share with you three convictions : firstly, the mechanisms of confidence cannot be replaced by “ algorithmic ” confidence, i. e. by rules of the game that would be coded once and for all and for which respect would be entrusted to algorithms, even if they are encapsulated in “ smart contracts "... will the forces pushing towards decentralised finance make unbalanced relationships disappear? as well as failing governance mechanisms, the concentration of operational risks, and cyber attacks? in my opinion, the answer is no : trusted third parties, central banks and supervisors are not about to disappear...

the acpr with representatives of digital asset service providers ( dasps ) on theapplication of anti - money laundering and counter - terrorism financing ( aml / cft ) rules to the cryptoasset sector. as you have understood from these examples, at the banque de france and the acprwe cannot envisage taking action without interacting with the innovative financial ecosystem that you largely represent. 3. this brings me to my last point : what are the challenges that we must not miss collectively? i would particularly like to emphasize here the issues related to the regulatory framework for the transformation of the financial system. the digital finance strategy published by the european commission is already a year old and the roadmap includes many useful and structuring projects for the future. already, the discussions on the mica ( crypto - assets ) and dora ( operational resilience ) projects illustrate the need to reconcile professionals ’ knowledge and operational realities with the general risk control objectives in order to achieve the balance between innovation and financial stability that i mentioned earlier. from my point of view as a supervisor, progress still needs to be made on these texts to reconcile the necessary pragmatism and the necessary flexibility that the search for this balance implies with the requirement for risk control and the prevention of regulatory arbitrage. however, the projects that will be launched in the future are no less crucial. i have in mind, in particular, the framework for the development of decentralised finance ( defi ), for which the usual regulatory frameworks come up against the absence of easily identifiable issuers or providers in an environment governed by protocols executed automatically without intermediaries, and the absence of an appropriate jurisdiction for the services offered. in order to build trust in the financial industry of tomorrow, we therefore need to follow together a two - pronged learning curve : exploring the transformation potential of new technologies on the financial sector, and identifying the regulatory, governance and best practice principles that must accompany this transformation. in this respect, i cannot emphasize enough the relevance for us of the experiments that we have recently conducted with the sector, for our activities of putting into circulation the currency that we issue as a central bank, as well as for our activities as supervisor of banks and insurers. the banque de france thus performed nine experiments with “ wholesale ” central bank digital currency between mid - 2020 and today. as for the acpr, it conducted this year, following the publication of its july 2020 report