Let me thank you for your attention and wish you a pleasant weekend and for those who are not Parisians a pleasant journey back home... today or I hope for some of you on Sunday!
The development of High Frequency Trading for instance – whose economic utility is by the way also questionable – could hamper the resilience of financial markets in times of stress. New services such as smart contracts embedded on a blockchain could create new shock transmission mechanisms or result in new forms of interconnectedness or pro-cyclicality that could be the sources of financial instability. Third, it could threaten market integration, especially in Europe after a decade of tremendous efforts to foster harmonization between financial markets. Such efforts are evidenced in the securities markets area, by the recent launch of the Target2 Securities platform in 2015, in the payments area, by the completion in 2016 of the second round of the SEPA project which now allows for fully harmonized credit transfers and direct debits denominated in euros, throughout the European Union. By contrast, the current profusion of new technologies, standards and protocols that are not fully interoperable, at least at this stage, constitutes a potential risk of market fragmentation. Additionally, they could lead to some kind of social fragmentation, if the new payment means are less accessible to the less welloff. 3. Against this background, public authorities play a key role in helping to reap the full benefits of innovation while preventing the threats it brings This implies first rethinking the regulation so as to strike the right balance between innovation and security.