I.  Evolution of payment and settlement systems  Looking back over several decades at the history of payment and settlement systems in Japan, both efficiency and safety have significantly improved. To put this in perspective, certain periods from the middle of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1990s were ones when more emphasis was put on raising efficiency.
Since then, the emphasis has shifted to enhancing the safety of the systems. Let me be more concrete. From the middle of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1990s, on the back of progress in financial liberalization and globalization as well as the increasing issuance of JGBs, it was difficult to manually process the large number of payment and settlement transactions.