SPEECH DATE:  12/06/2019  SPEAKER:  Deputy Governor Martin Flodén  VENUE:  The Riksbank  TION:  SVERIGES RIKSBANK SE-103 37 Stockholm (Brunkebergstorg 11) Tel +46 8 787 00 00 Fax +46 8 21 05 31 registratorn@riksbank.se www.riksbank.se  Should the Riksbank’s payment system be open 24/365? * The central bank's role in the Swedish payment infrastructure has increasingly come into focus at the Riksbank.1 I am aware that this is an area that may not perhaps interest the general public as much as negative interest rates, housing prices, cash-free shops, the krona exchange rate and other things normally associated with the Riksbank. Most people are not – to be honest – very interested in how the “plumbing” works that enables millions of payments to be made every day, to a total value of hundreds of billions of krona. This is not really surprising. Payments are not an objective in themselves, but a means of making our day-to-day life work; getting our wages, paying our bills, buying food, giving the children pocket money, saving for our retirement and so on. But, like other central banks, the Riksbank has been given the task of promoting a safe and efficient payment system. We at the Riksbank therefore need to understand how the payment system is put together and to consider what measures and investments are needed to ensure it remains safe and efficient. The Swedish payment market has changed rapidly over the past decade.
The crisis, for example, had a different impact on the Albanian economy, from what we had historically experienced. At the time, the Albanian economy did not seem to be vulnerable to the foreign sector. Subsequent analysis, however, showed that domestic imbalances had built and, indeed, made the economy vulnerable to a foreign credibility shock. It is crucial that research in central banks focus on available information and methodologies, which scrutinize existing paradigms, making this information useful to policymaking, before it becomes or leads to vulnerabilities. In light of the financial and human capital constraints faced by central banks in small, open economies, such as Albania, we believe that it is important for these topics to be discussed, in this workshop, with fellow researchers from academia and other central banks. I would like to encourage our researchers to publish their papers in relevant, peer-reviewed 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  journals as the most important certification of their work. This will make your research projects more useful and facilitate speedy implementation in mainstream policy making. Despite recent success in publications, one of the things that I hear the most is that there is not much research interest in the scientific study of small, developing or emerging market economies like Albania. From my prospective, I think that there is interest in the scientific study of small, developing or emerging market economies such as Albania, because of the particular and distinguishing characteristics of our economy, which can be different from those represented in mainstream research findings.