the motivation to prepare is a combination of all this. regardless of the scenario, our task is to ensure that the financial market services vital for society continue to function – even under circumstances which an individual company is unable to prepare for or, without official intervention, lacks sufficient incentives to do so. why preparedness became a key topic in finland [ slide 3 ] 2 / 6 bis - central bankers'speeches so, why did preparedness become a key topic in finland? there have been at least three different developments that have increased the need to be prepared in our financial sector. first, our banking sector has gone through big structural changes. previously, preparedness activities used to be local, and the credit institutions shared common principles on being prepared. in the last 20 years, there has been a shift from local services and it systems to international ones, both within financial institutions and across payment services. this has meant that cooperation in the financial sector, when it comes to preparedness activities, has become increasingly based on information sharing. important, of course, but simply not enough. second, technological development. new technologies and ways of providing financial services, such as online banking and cloud services, have been introduced. hand in hand with the obvious benefits come new risks as well. the financial sector consists of complex outsourcing chains that are difficult to manage. outsourcing can also lead to concentration risks, where one or a few service providers can become critical for the industry. therefore, understanding the complete value chain and the infrastructure in financial services is vital. and third, the geopolitical changes last year became the key driver for us. after russia's brutal invasion of ukraine, we not only reassessed our need to be part of nato, but also the risk of cyber or hybrid attacks to our financial infrastructure. we found it necessary to increase our preparedness in the financial sector, and the retail payment area in particular. finland as an island [ slide 4 ] in our financial sector, many of the critical systems are located outside our borders, beyond the baltic in most cases. this includes the core banking systems for several banks and significant elements of the processing of card payments. as for data connections, finland is an island : we are dependent on under - sea cables. adding to the criticality of our international data connections, we use cash very little in finland, which is also the case in other nordic countries, and we don't have a domestic bank card or debit card scheme. so,

most retail payments are processed via visa / mc rails. in addition, prior to last year, we were lacking sufficient national capabilities for processing interbank payments. against this background, we had tried, together with other finnish authorities, to raise awareness of the criticality of having a retail payment system that can function well under all circumstances – even if one or more banks cannot access their data for a prolonged period, or where transactions with international card schemes cannot be processed in the normal way. and for a long time, we failed in this. counterarguments were intuitive, such as the view that the dependency on under - sea cables should be tackled by securing the cables instead of burdening financial market 3 / 6 bis - central bankers'speeches players with domestic, sometimes duplicate, solutions. another view was that each institution should be responsible only for its own business continuity, not for its potential systemic implications. securing daily payments in finland [ slide 5 ] after 24 february last year this all changed. it was clear to the financial market authorities that preparedness had to be raised to the next level – especially when it comes to addressing cyber risks or being prepared for hybrid warfare. we also understood that we cannot immediately improve all systems against a wide range of threats. so, our objective was to create and implement national fallback arrangements to secure the most critical services. based on risk assessment, securing daily payments was recognised as the key priority. as a central bank, we certainly understand the value of a smooth flow of financing to the economy as well as orderly functioning of the securities market. but when it comes to bolstering the resilience of society, the necessity to secure retail payments cannot be sidestepped. people simply need to be able, on continuous basis, to pay with their debit cards, make and receive credit transfers and withdraw cash. the most urgent preparations for this consisted of legislative changes and building the technical capabilities. urgent legislative changes were introduced to parliament in late june of last year, and act 666 / 2022 entered into force just a couple of weeks later, on 11 july 2022. according to the new rules, the financial stability authority, which is the resolution authority in finland, maintains a national emergency account system that consists of two parts : the national emergency account service and the national emergency payment card service. the system is activated if and when the availability of one or more credit institutions'operating systems is prevented, leading to the unavailability of account information, or if