Shortly after, HSBC and Bank of America did a proof-of-concept that showed how trade finance processes could be streamlined using blockchains and smart contracts. Building on these, MAS and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority will jointly develop the Global Trade Connectivity Network, a cross-border platform for trade finance using distributed ledger technology. GTCN will be an open architecture platform that enables the seamless transfer of digital documents and data across borders, starting with the Singapore-Hong Kong trade corridor. If all goes well, we expect the GTCN to go live in early 2019. Strengthening Supervision and Reducing Compliance Cost: SupTech It is not only the financial industry that needs FinTech, but regulators as well. MAS has embarked on its own FinTech journey to make our supervision more effective and the compliance burden we impose less painful. We call it Supervisory Technology, or SupTech for short. Let me give an example: detecting trade syndicates in the stock market. One of the most difficult things to detect in the market is collusive behaviour and price manipulation. MAS has put in place a data analytics and pattern recognition system, to study trading behaviour and detect accounts that may be 6/9  BIS central bankers' speeches  acting in concert to manipulate share prices, or engaging in circular trading to create a false impression of market interest.
The international component is particularly apparent in that the majority of banks today conduct a considerable amount of business in several EU countries. At the same time, the responsibility for supervision and crisis management remains at the national level. This entails obvious risks of coordination problems and conflicts of interest between countries, which naturally do not promote financial stability. It is therefore necessary that organisations for supervision and crisis management be coordinated within the EU. Lower repo rate in the wake of the crisis The escalating crisis intensifies the downswing in the Swedish economy, which was already apparent. As can be seen in the Monetary Policy Report from 23 October, our growth forecast for next year has been revised sharply downward to the prospect of zero growth. To alleviate the real economic effects of the financial crisis, over a short period the repo rate was cut by one percentage point to the current level of 3.75 per cent. Our forecast for the repo rate shows that in the future it may need to be lowered by an additional half percentage point over the course of the next six months. We can do this without jeopardising the inflation target. It is mainly rising commodity prices in the global market, such as the price of oil and food, that have driven inflation upwards. Now that the price trend for these commodities has broken and turned downwards, the rate of inflation will drop rapidly. At the same time, domestic inflationary pressure will be eased by the weaker economic trend.