Central banks are expected to continue to use the asset side of their balance sheets, as well as other tools such as forward guidance, in addition to their standard interest rate policies, as the effective lower bound will likely continue to be a binding constraint on interest rate policy in a low inflation, low interest rate environment.
We are not yet there with the SEPA for cards, i.e. a harmonised, competitive and innovative European card payments area. Without wanting to pre-empt the discussions at this conference, I would first like to highlight three areas that are critical to the realisation of the SEPA for cards: standardisation, interoperability and security.