anita angelovska bezhoska : national fintech strategy to be developed opening remarks by ms anita angelovska bezhoska, governor of the national bank of the republic of north macedonia, at the nbrm workshop on fintech, skopje, 6 december 2019. * * * dear mr. jay tikam, representatives of the financial sector regulators, ministries dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure to open this fintech event organized as part of our ongoing efforts to encourage fintech debate among regulators, supervisors, relevant ministries and other stakeholders. as many times before, the european fund for southeast europe, has again proved its long - standing support for delivering workshops in a number of central bank areas, for which we are sincerely thankful. the main idea of this workshop is to raise awareness among decision makers and other stakeholders on the importance of the new fintech solutions and at the same time to lay ground for its development in our country, starting by identifying relevant goals and activities to be envisaged in our forthcoming national fintech strategy. over the last couple of years, the development of financial technology and its penetration in a wide spectrum of financial services has gained momentum. a variety of fintech solutions are being offered, which can be broadly clustered in three groups : a ) financial services, as business that offer internet based applications for instance for managing personal finance, trading securities, automating financial services ( robotization ) ; b ) financing, via platforms that directly match investors and lenders, such as crowdfunding, or peer to peer lending ; c ) payments, via more innovative and customer tailored payment solutions. no doubts we have that fintech offers wide - ranging opportunities. it holds the promise of reducing costs and frictions, narrowing information asymmetry, enhancing efficiency and competition, and increasingly important, broadening access to wider set of financial services – especially in low - income countries and for underserved part of the population – although it may take time for the benefits of technological change to fully materialize. against this background, ongoing innovations and technological advances can support stronger growth dynamics and higher inclusiveness of the growth, thus speeding up the real convergence process through a number of channels. for small economies, such as ours, fintech innovations can play important role in facilitating trade integration. more convenient and cheaper instruments for digital payments can set basis for easier cross - border trade, including e - commerce that currently plays a marginal role in the region. and there

philip r lane : the monetary policy toolbox and the effective lower bound welcome address by mr philip r lane, member of the executive board of the european central bank, at the ecb conference on monetary policy “ bridging science and practice ”, frankfurt am main, 11 october 2021. * * * it is a pleasure to welcome you to the 2021 edition of the annual ecb conference on monetary policy. as captured in the title of this year ’ s event, this conference series serves a vital role in bridging the science and practice of monetary policy. in particular, it is essential for the ecb to incorporate in our analytical framework the theoretical and empirical insights generated by the global academic community, and the conference format ( albeit in webinar mode again this year ) is very effective in providing us with a platform to discuss the latest developments. the breadth of academic research ( in terms of both topics and research techniques ) that is relevant for monetary policy is quite wide and this is reflected in the composition of the conference programme. the agenda includes research that exploits financial market data to examine the transmission of monetary policy, studies the impact of the pandemic on firms and banks using entity - level datasets, analyses the interactions between monetary policy and financial stability in a full - scale macroeconomic model, and explores the impact of monetary and fiscal policies on the formation of household expectations. in addition, the conference features two keynote speeches that address some of the most important issues facing central banks : monetary - fiscal interactions and the macroeconomics of climate change. under normal conditions, the informal discussions at these annual conferences provide a useful opportunity to increase external awareness of the monetary policy research conducted at the ecb and across the eurosystem. since such informal interactions cannot be reproduced in webinar format, i will take this opportunity to highlight the extraordinary research efforts of the ecb and eurosystem staff in supporting our recent monetary policy strategy review. in particular, eighteen ecb occasional papers were released on 21 september. these papers provide not only a superb series of surveys of the state of research on a given topic but also report many substantive new research findings : i believe that these occasional papers lay important foundations for many research programmes in academia and in central banks for years to come. the research reported in these papers shaped our new monetary policy strategy. in particular, a central theme of the review was to work out the implications of the trend decline in the equilibrium real interest rate and the associated implications of the