and it is unprecedented. i am sure i have left you in no doubt as to its urgency. so the benefits of us working together to share experience and build practical guidance are monumental. we have now reached the point that we need to move. move from bold statements to boring but crucial details. from sweeping visionary speeches to the nuts and bolts of the technical eng ine rooms of central banking and prudential supervision. when we ’ re knee deep in the weeds with these details, we could easily be distracted from our ultimate destination. we can easily become preoccupied by the bushes we cut away, the path we ’ re finding, the progress we make. but we should never take our eyes off our ultimate destination. it ’ s not a question of being satisfied with taking a few steps forward. no. we need to actually get to where we want to go. getting to paris. on time. that ’ s where we wan t to be. this means a lot of work from you. the hard core technical part has started. the part where the economists and econometrists deliver. although you may be experts in the economy rather than ecology, your expertise is equally valuable in both fields. i assure you. yet climate change is not the only challenge we face. the world will need fresh water. a decline in biodiversity could limit the operations of businesses in a specific region. these risks too, could affect financial institutions. i am pleased to see that these other environmental risks are also appearing on our radar. fout! onbekende naam voor documenteigenschap. the next step we need to take, and soon, is to dedicate more resources to environmental risks and how they have impact on our work. a lot still needs to be done. i hope today will inspire you to be bold, think freely, stimulate each other, embrace competition and expand our horizons. because next year, when we gather again, i hope we will be making the same swift progress. i hope we will be able to show how we have put these six recommendations into practice. and i hope we will have explored new territories with new members. because with your help, the seeds that were planted here in paris will grow even further and flourish. because there is no limit to what countless hands, what humanity, can achieve. when working together, with a commonly held belief in a shared objective.

on other issues. any self - regulatory nature of the sepa council shall be complemented by regulation and / or competition to find out the most efficient solutions to integrate the market. in any case, the notion of self - regulation versus regulation shall be seen as a dynamic phenomenon which may change over time. i admit that finding the right combination of self - regulation and regulation always represents a challenge, but the in addition to the eu27, sepa comprises iceland, liechtenstein, monaco, norway, and switzerland. sepa makes use of iso standards, such as iban and iso20022. iso20022 is the standard used for t2s and plays an important role for the future developments in target2. bis central bankers ’ speeches benefits of market - driven solutions for retail payments in europe are apparent. in addition, it is important that self - regulation is guided by the search for europe - wide solutions, thereby preventing any recourse to national and fragmented market structures. fragmentation of retail payment markets can lead to inefficient market structures and higher costs to participants and society as a whole. measuring the true underlying costs of retail payments is not trivial. some pioneering national central banks have already looked into this issue at domestic level. european cross - country comparisons are so far uncharted territory. it is only recently that the ecb has shown in a study7, 8 that the social costs of retail payment instruments, including cash and non - cash payments, are substantial. they amount to almost 1 % of gdp in europe. the study also makes clear that considerable differences exist within europe. in facilitating the debate among participants in the payment chain, the ecb study seeks to provide an important tool for further benchmarking and efficiency analysis. another important dimension is trust in the safety of retail payment instruments. in this sense, the protection of individuals ’ payments data becomes more and more sensitive and important. data breaches can have effects as devastating as environmental disasters9 and undermine overall confidence and faith in a currency and retail payment instruments. therefore, payments data have to be handled with utmost care. it should be protected from misuse, while at the same time recognising the need for open and fair competition in the payments field. let me also point out the issue of financial inclusion. it is interesting to note that in the eu not everybody has a bank account. for example, one - quarter of italians and one - third of hungarians do not have a bank account. according to