restrictive stance of monetary policy increasingly weighed on activity through 2023, and, notwithstanding the ongoing uncertainties with the official data, has led to a loosening in the labour market. i support the more balanced outlook on risks to inflation set out in the mpc ’ s latest forecasts. although services inflation and wages growth have fallen by somewhat more in recent months than we had expected last autumn, key indicators of inflation persistence remain elevated. in terms of my thinking about the future, i am looking for more evidence about how entrenched this persistence will be and therefore about how long the current level of bank rate will need to be maintained. innovations in payments and settlement now, i ’ d like to shift my focus from normalisation of our balance sheet to innovation. i started my remarks today by highlighting how understanding and supporting innovation in the settlement infrastructure on which all financial markets rely is a key element in delivering monetary and financial stability. our focus needs to be on understanding the risks and opportunities that innovation poses, and what it means for how we meet our objectives. this is particularly important in these core markets, where bond issuance and trading volumes continue to be significant. indeed, i can draw on afme ’ s own government bond data report to highlight that eu member states and the uk issued eur 850 bn in bonds and bills in q3 2023 alone, with average daily trading volumes consistently hovering around eur 100bn through the first three quarters of 2023. daily clearing and settlement in the city of london dates back to around 1770, when bank clerks would meet at the five bells pub to exchange cheques in one place and settle balances arising in cash. the first banker ’ s clearing house was built in lombard street in 1833, and settlement in cash was replaced by settlement across accounts held at the bank of england in 1854. the current institutional arrangement for securities settlement came into being in 1996, with the launch of the crest settlement system. this is underpinned by the real - time gross settlement service ( rtgs ), which is also the means through which we operationalise the bank ’ s balance sheet. reserves are held in reserve accounts under the sterling monetary framework within rtgs. in our recent history the provision of the essential services supporting settlement of uk securities has been in crest, where the bank continues to play a central role. in 2023 we settled on average £342bn per day in crest transactions. this is facilitated by the delivery versus payment ( dvp ) link

of common data standards in the financial sector? two key principles underlie our approach to helping develop and adopt data standards. first, this will be no big bang event. as the lei journey shows, developing standards takes time. we, the fca and industry will need to move forwards step - by - step, use case by use case, delivering value and benefits as we go. that means taking one area of data at a time, with the right specialists participating in the work to develop standards for those data. when each use case is finished, and value has been delivered, lessons learnt can be applied to the next use case. to give a concrete example, an early use case we identified in last year ’ s review was data on lending for commercial real estate. commercial real estate lending, or cre, is an important sector for any central bank charged with guarding financial stability. following the great financial crisis, andy haldane ( then the bank of england ’ s executive director for financial stability, now our chief economist ), suggested that commercial property has contributed more to financial crises than any other area of industry outside of banking6. as alex brazier, his successor as financial stability ed subsequently put it, when commercial real estate catches a cold, the whole economy starts to shiver7. so we need good data on cre lending. but the sector has a tradition of negotiated, paper contracts, and a lack of automation in how loans were agreed and managed. this has meant that accessing good quality data on the cre market is difficult, both for regulators and for market participants. to help address this, industry participants are working on creating a central utility for accessing granular cre data8. but creating this utility will mean firms need to share the data used to run their cre businesses. and they will need a common way to identify and label core cre data – for example a consistent way of labelling the ‘ loan amount ’ of a cre loan, or the loan ’ s ‘ arrangement fees ’. the commercial property forum twenty years on - remarks by andrew haldane ( bankofengland. co. uk ) speech by alex brazier at the city of london property investors'banquet london on monday 19 october 2015 ( bankofengland. co. uk ) a vision for real estate finance in the uk all speeches are available online at www. bankofengland. co. uk / news / speeches and @ boe _ pressoffice if