In order to reach a wider audience it is our intention to publish, in the coming year, a detailed report on our work in the area of payments systems oversight. Our oversight role - covering, as it does, payment systems and payment instruments - leads naturally to an interest in the issues being covered here today, SEPA and the National Payments Implementation Programme.
In addition to the long-standing interconnections between the US and European financial systems, the increasing share of emerging economies in world GDP and world financial assets means that extent and nature of financial trade between the UK and the EU in part depends on alternative global configurations, with trade diversion as well as trade destruction part of the potential fallout from barriers to financial trade between the UK and the EU.