move between financial institutions out of hours, constraining the services that can be offered to end - users of the payments system. some would argue that anything more is unnecessary and that consumers and businesses are not unduly inconvenienced by this. but we receive enough complaints about this to suggest that expectations are changing. it is not that long ago that it was accepted that if a person wanted to ensure that they had enough cash to see them through the weekend, they had to make sure that they visited their bank branch by closing time on friday. but we would all see that as completely unacceptable these days and i think we have reason to hold the rest of our payments system to the same standards. one question that we have come back to during the strategic review is what sort of payments system architecture would best allow us to deliver the features that we think are going to be demanded by payments system users in the years to come, including improved timeliness. australia has had a long - running practice of operating payment systems that are based on both bilateral business agreements between participants and the bilateral exchange of payments between those participants. this model presents a number of problems, not least the complexity and cost of adding a new entrant, which must establish similar arrangements with each existing participant. some of the significant changes we have seen in the payments system over the past few years have represented partial moves away from those bilateral arrangements. this includes the move to the industry community of interest network for clearing payments and the creation of eftpos payments australia limited to centralise governance of the eftpos system. these changes denote recognition of the constraints of bilateral payment systems. while the reserve bank does not advocate walking away from some of the well - established and low - cost bilateral systems we have, we can see a strong case for any new architecture that is established to meet emerging needs to be based on centralised architecture ; that is, a hub and spokes, rather than bilateral, model. so these are some of the things that will gain attention in the conclusions of the strategic review of innovation when they are released in the next couple of weeks. i do not mean to suggest that the issues identified by the review will be solved quickly, but i think we – the industry and the regulator – owe it to the users we serve to embark now on the process that will get us on to the right path. as a first step, in the months following the release of the conclusions of the review, i expect

there to be a healthy dialogue with the industry on the sorts of goals that the payments system board has in mind for the payments system, along with more focused discussions on some specific solutions. other work of the payments system board i have been talking about the innovation review and the way it will alter, in some respects, the role played by the payments system board in the future. but it is also worthwhile to talk briefly about other developments that also have an impact on the direction of the board more generally. the reality is that the board ’ s mandate of promoting stability, efficiency and competition requires it to play quite different roles in respect of two quite different sets of players in the bis central bankers ’ speeches financial system. most people in this room would think of the payments system board as the body that capped credit card interchange fees and worked with the industry to achieve reforms in the atm system. there is another set of players out there who think of the payments system board as the body that seeks to ensure the stability of key financial market infrastructure, or “ fmis ”, such as securities settlement systems and, increasingly importantly, central counterparties – which stand between financial market participants in order to better manage risk. much of this role came to the board later than its initial payments mandate, when the corporations act 2001 adopted licensing arrangements for all clearing and settlement facilities in 2001. as important as the board ’ s work on payments system efficiency is, the stable operation of fmis has a direct bearing on financial market and financial system stability. oversight of fmis therefore demands a significant proportion of the board ’ s time. it is also this work that is expanding most rapidly. in fulfilling its responsibility for the stability of financial market infrastructure, the board has historically focused on the high - value payments system, rits, with which people in this room are more than familiar, along with the debt and equities settlement systems operated by the asx and the equities and derivatives central counterparties also operated by the asx. in addition, the reserve bank has for some years been part of an international cooperative oversight arrangement for the global foreign exchange settlement system, continuous linked settlement ( cls ). two developments mean that the bank ’ s and the board ’ s workload in this area is increasing. first, while most financial market infrastructures serving australian markets are currently operated by one entity, cross - border competition is increasing, particularly for central counterparty clearing services. it is likely that the bank ’ s oversight responsibilities