A good candidate could for instance be our policy to support fair access to payment instruments: Banque de France is committed to ensure the availability in our jurisdiction of a range of payment instruments suited the needs of all users. The development of electronic payments based on innovative technologies lays the foundation for a smoother and safer payment experience. But this should not exclude part of the population. Up to now, a large part of financial inclusion has also  been about making access to cash easier for those who don’t have a credit or debit card, and ensuring the acceptance and availability of banknotes has therefore been an important dimension of our retail payment policy. But changes in payment solutions supply and changes in payment habits in favour of electronic payments may make this policy more difficult and costly to maintain going forward. One possibility often mentioned would be for the issuance of a central bank digital currency accessible to the general public. At this stage, in many developed economies and certainly in Europe, the business case for this kind of innovation does not appear to me such that it should be a short-term priority. The priority should rather be to facilitate cross-border payments. The case is for me more compelling for a central bank digital currency at the wholesale level, for use between financial intermediaries, given the potential for a quick and widespread tokenization of financial assets.
Le Lab is a genuine Open Innovation laboratory: its goal is to bring new practices and technologies into our activities, and to that end experiment where necessary within short and flexible cycles. To do so, it works in close collaboration with innovative firms. An example of this work is to use artificial intelligence to improve our scoring of businesses. Scoring is something that Banque de France has been doing for a very long time: its branch network all over France gives quotations of companies based on analysis of financial data but also on-site visits (more than 250.000 last year). These quotations are then provided to banks and other institutions, in order to facilitate access to financing and therefore financial inclusion for many SMEs. This is why we are working, in collaboration with start-ups, on how to improve our data analysis and include learning algorithms in our scoring process. Of course, this is not easy – the integration in existing processes is complex, in particular the role of expert judgment. And we are 3/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  also part of a larger experiment led by the French government called “signaux faibles” (low signals). It aims at bringing together data from various French public authorities and developing AI analysis capacity to identify businesses showing signs of vulnerability, in order to better target public support towards them. A second way is by revisiting some of our policies and adapting them.