banco de espana is stepping up the efforts it devotes both to monitoring technological innovation and to anticipating its potential consequences. through a crossdepartmental working structure, various matters are being addressed in order to contribute to constructing an informed opinion and helping define the central bank ’ s strategic positioning. subjects under analysis are, for instance, the implications of the provisions of the new directive on payment services, known as psd2, whose partial transposition in spain is imminent, under the government ’ s annual regulatory plan, and to which i shall shortly refer. and there are also other topical matters, such as distributed ledger technology, “ cloud ” computing and the phenomenon of sovereign digital currencies. 3 / 8 against this backdrop, the aim of my address is to offer some observations as to how the new technologies are changing the traditional bank - customer relationship, and to highlight the need for banks and customers to responsibly manage this new scenario. likewise, i wish to stress the importance of financial education in this new scenario. customers have more options, but also more responsibility, and it is essential they should be aware of this. returning to the origins of the concern for the rights of bank customers. to set these observations in perspective, we might recall that concern in spain to safeguard customer rights arose in the 1980s, as a consequence of the liberalisation the industry underwent and which enshrined freedom of contract – of interest rates and commissions – at the core of its workings. accompanying this process, legislators adopted a series of measures aimed at boosting competition among banks, including most notably the enhanced comparative information with which banks must provide their customers, so that they may know the content of their rights and obligations before and once they have given their consent. however, this concern for customer rights came into being and developed in a context of maximum customer confidence towards banks and, most importantly, towards bank employees, which, in short, led to a high degree of customer loyalty to banks. during the 1990s and in the first half of the last decade such loyalty was negatively and slowly impacted by growing competition and the subsequent need to improve net interest margins. and the crisis unleashed as from 2007 saw the culmination of this deterioration and led to a significant loss of confidence by customers in banks, giving rise to a new scenario. against this background of public mistrust in banks, and the weakening of the aforementioned degree of loyalty, the new technologies add additional challenges for the industry when it comes to tending to

a large number of small - sized and relatively unproductive firms alongside a relatively small group of large, better positioned corporations, but which also show somewhat lower productivity than their european counterparts. specifically, the relative productivity of small spanish firms is 40 % lower than that of german, french and italian companies. this difference progressively diminishes as the 12 / 18 productivity of large companies is analysed ; in any event, however, the negative difference never falls below 10 %. which factors account for these dynamics? according to the economic literature, the various factors that may influence an economy ’ s productivity growth include most notably the human capital available, the capacity to innovate, access to and allocation of funding, market regulation and the degree of sectoral competition. 3 4 human and technological capital turning to human capital, let me first stress the gradual improvement in the spanish population ’ s level of educational attainment in recent decades. there will have been further progress in recent years owing to the extension of the formative period for youths during the crisis. hence, 24 % of those aged 60 - 64 did not complete what now constitutes the first cycle of secondary education, while among those aged 25 - 29 this figure has dropped to 6 %. see syverson c. ( 2011 ) : “ what determines productivity ”, journal of economic literature, 49 ( 2 ), pp. 326 - 365. see chapter 3 “ growth and reallocation of resources in the spanish economy ”, annual report 2014, banco de espana, and chapter 2 “ financing and investment decisions of spanish non - financial corporations ”, annual report 2016, banco de espana. 13 / 18 despite these positive developments, the spanish education system has still to face significant challenges. these include most notably the high early school dropout rate ( 18. 3 % among those aged 18 - 24 ) and the poor performance of our pupils in standardised exams at the international level, indicative of low educational quality compared with that of other developed countries. the evidence available shows that these poor results have not only to do with students ’ relative knowledge, but also with their non - cognitive skills ( such as the desire to innovate, self - control and the ability to concentrate ). 5 in light of this evidence, adding to which is the need to address issues such as globalisation and digitalisation, we should reconsider the institutional design of the spanish education system, learning methods and the content of the educational curriculum. spanish entrepreneurs also show some