One measure in the UK is a decline in the banks’ (and building societies’) share in the assets of the whole financial sector (including securities firms, collective investment vehicles, and life assurance and pension funds’ investments etc) which has fallen fairly steadily over the past 10 years, from close to 70% to some 55%. I believe that in the US, where financial innovation has probably been even greater, comparable figures also show this decline, from around 45% in the mid-1970s to about one third now. In the UK, bank lending to the corporate sector has fallen, erratically, from some 27% of total corporate borrowing outstanding (including all forms of debt as well as equity issuance) in 1985 to less than 17%. This mainly reflects the increased access of larger corporate borrowers to the domestic and international capital markets for short and longer-term corporate paper, where they often have a better credit rating than banks. Smaller corporates, on the other hand, remain very heavily dependent upon bank finance - for well over half their overall needs. Meanwhile the banks’ share of net external finance of the personal sector has not changed much at all over the past decade, at around 80%. Trends in the liquidity of bank assets are difficult to assess because liquidity itself is so hard to judge simply from balance sheet categories. The advent of securitisation and the direct sale of loans ought to have helped.
The short answer to this question, which I will now illustrate, is, on the one hand, to be a useful player in the FinTech ecosystem and, on the other hand, to promote and implement a regulatory framework and appropriate supervisory practices that foster both innovation and the stability of our financial system. * 1/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  In order to be a useful player in the Fintech ecosystem, we have two objectives: facilitate and  experiment Facilitate, firstly. This is what we are doing via the implementation of specific support tools. For instance, under the aegis of a national start-up correspondent, who is also the French Tech correspondent, the Banque de France has just deployed a network of regional start-up correspondents in each of the 13 French Tech capitals. Their mission is to be the key point of reference for rating start-ups and providing them with support and guidance thanks to their knowledge of funding mechanisms and of the main players in the ecosystem. As regards the ACPR, I no longer need to present theFinTech Innovation Unit, which has already held hundreds of meetings with start-ups since its creation. Its purpose is to provide an easily accessible entry point for those with innovative projects, giving them some initial regulatory guidance to help them shape their projects and then refer them to the right correspondents for the necessary registrations or authorisations. Naturally, our facilitation efforts are not limited to bilateral contacts alone.