that are out of touch with what ’ s actually happening on the ground. we need to be able to map our progress towards regtech 2025, and understand where our banks and other ecosystem partners are at in that journey. 7. our white paper on regtech published in november last year provided a very good starting point, supplemented by the regtech adoption index that we have just launched recently. these have shown that most banks here are already using at least some form of regtech in their operations, most commonly in preventing and detecting financial crimes. but they are using regtech much less in their risk management and regulatory compliance activities, despite the many advantages that doing so could bring for them. 8. more generally, banks currently have little engagement with the wider regtech ecosystem. we found that only 16 % of banks are currently taking part in associations and industry 1 / 3 bis central bankers'speeches groups and only 33 % of banks are partnering with regtech firms. so this is an area that definitely needs more work. 9. our second action is to raise regtech awareness among banks – in particular their awareness of the benefits, applications and solutions associated with regtech. 10. our regtech adoption index told us that a massive 86 % of banks consider one of the top public sector activities in this space should be to enhance the engagement between the banking sector and the regtech ecosystem. 11. and this is where today ’ s virtual event comes in! it brings together banks, regulators, regtech providers, industry associations, and representatives from other parts of the regtech ecosystem. we see this as a perfect opportunity for banks to learn more about the potential benefits of regtech for their own operations and also for their customers. 12. as part of the efforts to raise awareness, the hkma has also been publishing a series of regtech watch newsletters since november 2019. this series of articles outlines the benefits of regtech through providing high - level sample use cases for areas like cyber risk, credit risk, aml / cft, and also conduct management. 13. building on the regtech watch, we are launching a new series called “ regtech adoption practice guides ”. this provides more practical implementation guidance when you use regtech. we also plan to create a centralised regtech knowledge hub as a platform for sharing regtech information and content. we do hope that all these initiatives taken together will allow banks to become much more familiar with regtech and also help them manage the regtech

although at a slower pace than over the past year. it has been a remarkable achievement by the economy to keep expanding for so long while so many other economies have fallen by the wayside. usually, when an economy has a very long expansion, over - confidence or hubris creeps in and potentially dangerous distortions or imbalances start to appear. as i have pointed out on a number of occasions, these imbalances often take the form of an asset price boom, usually in equities or commercial property, a boom in physical investment or, in earlier years, a surge in real wages. we have not had any of these in australia in this expansion, which goes a long way to explaining why it has endured. the closest we have come to such an imbalance is the rise in residential property prices, which has produced distortions in some parts of that market. i will conclude by saying a few words about that subject. residential property prices it is not surprising that house prices have risen a lot over the past half decade or so. with australia ’ s return to being a low - inflation economy, the general level of interest rates, including mortgage rates, fell to less than half their level of the previous decade. this enabled households to take on higher levels of debt, which they did, with most of it put towards buying better and more expensive houses. if a decade ago we had known with certainty what was going to happen to inflation and, hence, interest rates, we should have been able to predict this outcome. the difficult part, however, is to determine how much of the rise in house prices was the logical outcome of this economic adjustment, and how much, if any, indicated overshooting or bubble - like behaviour. my guess is that nearly all of the rise in house prices was in the first category, and i have been very reluctant to conclude that any was in the second category, at least until early this year. but when it became apparent that over the past year or so an exceptionally high proportion of lending for housing was being directed towards investors rather than owner - occupiers, we at the reserve bank started to become concerned. in fact, the figures we presented in our statement on monetary policy showed that over the year to august, lending approvals to investors rose by 42 per cent, while approvals to owneroccupiers rose by 1 per cent. something very unusual was clearly happening, and this was confirmed by the building approval figures showing much