It is therefore not surprising to see that our Fintech Supervisory Sandbox and Chatroom have seen high levels of demand for early supervisory engagement on potential use cases. 7. Second, public–private partnerships between law enforcement agencies, regulators and financial institutions exhibited a remarkable growth in the last three years, including in Hong Kong. That brought about clear improvements to our ability to identify and disrupt financial crime. Let me give you some idea of the results that the partnership in Hong Kong is capable of delivering. Since its launch in 2017, actions taken by banks through the Fraud and Money Laundering Intelligence Taskforce (FMLIT) have led to $ million being restrained or confiscated – that is the proceeds of financial crime, investment scams, fraud 1/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  and other serious crimes. 8. And thirdly, there has been an increasing cultural change in the banks that we supervise – a move away from an overarching desire to simply “tick the boxes”. AML work is now increasingly viewed as more of a multi-dimensional activity, to which the understanding of risks – both current and future – is central and fundamental. There is a much broader acceptance that it is this understanding of the risks which then determines which tools to use, and which tools to develop for possible future use, in order to tackle new and emerging threats.
People must realise that the Central Bank exerts a limited long term impact on the exchange rate. The exchange rate depends on various economic factors, including foreign trade, foreign investment in Iceland and investment by Icelanders abroad, and last but not least expectations about future economic developments. For example, there is little doubt that expectations in connection with power-intensive industry have already influenced the exchange rate of the króna, which at present is stronger than if decisions on large-scale investment in aluminium production had not been announced. Interest rates certainly affect the exchange rate, but experience in Iceland and elsewhere shows that in the long run this impact tends to fade out if monetary policy aims for rate of inflation close to the prevailing rate among trading partner countries. Likewise, the Central Bank's foreign exchange market intervention tends to have only a short-lived effect. If the exchange rate is moving with a strong momentum in a certain direction, no central bank can resist this for long. This is a common experience of all countries that have liberalized international capital movements, which was also shared by the Central Bank of Iceland when it tried to stem the depreciation of the króna from mid 2000 until autumn 2001. Recent calls for the Central Bank to set an exchange rate target are unrealistic.