of trading opportunities and reach economies of scale faster. • this is what the business sans borders initiative by mas and the infocomm development authority is seeking to do. • bsb is an open connector of platforms ( a “ meta - hub ” ) which helps address three challenges faced by smes – opaque pricing, complex supply chains, and lack of access to digital solutions. 2 / 3 bis central bankers'speeches • this is a cross - border platform, connecting infrastructure across countries. fundamentally, finance needs to support the way people live their lives and businesses go about their business. • embedding innovation and digital finance in people ’ s lives is the only way to achieve sustained and meaningful financial inclusion. • as countries, we must learn from one other, partner in innovative projects, and manage risks collaboratively. • and we should do so with the consumer right at the centre of our thinking. 3 / 3 bis central bankers'speeches

to issue or had issued in the previous week. maintaining the programme i don ’ t want to imply that implementing and maintaining our programme of asset purchases was straightforward operationally. far from it. for example, the gilt market became somewhat more dislocated as the bank accumulated a large percentage of some of the particular gilts in issue. to alleviate stress in the market, in august 2009 we started to lend out, via the dmo, a proportion of the gilts the bank had bought, in exchange for others that had readier availability. 10 the market responded rapidly to that development and, towards the end of the £200bn programme, some contacts were telling us that gilt market liquidity had actually improved relative to march 2009. one small point to clear up in relation to maintaining the programme is whether we should be re - investing the interest receipts earned on the gilts. in the united states, the federal open market committee recently decided that, to maintain the effectiveness of their asset purchases they needed to re - invest the proceeds from maturing assets and interest receipts. that reflects the fact that in large part they purchased ( pass - through ) mortgage - backed securities where, in addition to receiving coupon payments, a proportion of the underlying assets are constantly maturing or being pre - paid. absent a re - investment programme, and making assumptions about pre - payment rates, the stock of assets in the us programme might have declined at a rate of around 17 ½ % pa. in the uk purchase programme we bought nearly all gilts 11, with at least 3 years to maturity. the earliest gilt redemption won ’ t occur until the second half of 2012. we are receiving dividend payments and those have currently cumulated to a value around 5 % of the total stock of purchases. 12 these receipts were anticipated, are currently held in the fund and will contribute to repaying the original funding of the programme. a good argument can be made that, to keep the monetary stimulus of asset purchases constant, this cash should be reinvested in more gilts. we have taken the view that such fine - tuning is an unnecessary complication at this stage. if the mpc want to undertake further purchases, it would be straightforward to simply buy more gilts financed by issuing commercial bank reserves. it was important that the gilts were not lent against cash, as that would have undone some of the intended impact of the initial asset purchases. the 3 month commercial paper purchased had nearly all