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change are blowing a gale through finance, led by payments. new technological barbarians are appearing at the gates, transferring monies cheaper, faster and easier than ever. many private sector initiatives are underway currently to develop so - called “ stablecoins ” – digital currencies backed by pools of safe assets. and debates are advancing rapidly too on the possibility of central banks themselves issuing a digital form of cash, so - called central bank digital currencies ( cbdc ). 28 so far, these debates have tended to focus on the payment benefits of these new technologies, often led by payment technicians. this is an approach i remember well from working on payments myself in the 1990s. back then, monetary policy and banking stability were often out of scope when designing payment schemes. at the time, i thought this was a mistake : the supply and distribution of money is central to monetary policy and banking stability too. we published another book – another resounding failure – making this point. 29 i see a similar pattern now in the debate over stablecoins and cbdc. resilience of this new payments medium is, of course, crucial. but the case for adopting, and the means of designing, these new payment instruments needs to weigh a richer array of considerations to harvest the full fruits of this innovation. specifically, far greater focus needs i think to be placed on the longer - term monetary and financial stability benefits of these new monetary technologies, as the bank ’ s recent work has argued. 30 on financial stability, a widely - used digital currency could change the topology of banking fundamentally. it could result in something akin to narrow banking, with safe, payments - based activities segregated from banks ’ riskier credit - provision activities. in other words, the traditional model of banking familiar for over 800 years could be disrupted. while the focus of debate so far has been on the costs of this disruption, largely in the form of disintermediation of existing agents, there are significant potential benefits to be had too. specifically, this could lead to a closer alignment of risk for those institutions, new and old, offering these services - narrow banking for payments ( money backed by safe assets ) and limited purpose banking for lending ( risky assets backed by risky liabilities ). this radically different topology, while not costless, would reduce at source the fragilities in the banking model that have been causing financial crises for over 800 years. given the costs of those crises – large and rising – this is