This year, we are going to make such a review as well. We have been targeting inflation for five years by now. Over this period, we were able to maintain inflation close to the target for quite a long time. By the moment, the financial sector and, largely, the society and businesses have a better understanding how this works. Professional market participants have their inflation expectations anchored at the long-term target, and, importantly, this influences long-term interest rates. Some parameters of our policy were associated with the fact that we were launching inflation targeting at the stage of disinflation when we were lowering inflation from high levels. For instance, we set our target as a point in order to anchor inflation expectations at it. We avoided setting a range fearing that inflation expectations might get stuck at the upper bound. In our opinion, the target rate conformed to the level of the market maturity. However, it has changed somewhat over this period. The operational procedure we selected was also in line with the market structure. Today, we need to find out whether this structure has changed so that we now need certain adjustments in our procedure. We are going to analyse the above issues and some other aspects within our review. We will carry out comprehensive work in this regard. At first, we will perform research and analysis engaging our research divisions who will test particular hypotheses.
End-to-end efficiency also means that innovation in payments origination and receipt integrates smoothly into demand account systems and traverses risk filters and the payments infrastructure with both speed and relatively low cost. We have ample room to increase efficiency. End-users are still writing paper checks by the billions across many different use cases. Some recent payment innovations are designed to address these opportunities. For example, in the P2P space there are PayPal, PopMoney and Dwolla; in B2B, Paymode X and PayNetExchange; for bill payment, FIS and Fiserv, and among the proliferating mobile options, Square Wallet and LevelUp. In many ways, however, checks continue to provide features that are not replicated by electronic alternatives and innovations. Checks offer a large measure of ubiquity. In other words, senders and receivers can reach nearly everyone without signing up for multiple services. They provide convenience because the payer doesn’t have to know the payee’s account information. Virtually all the innovative services I noted involve closed payment communities, which require both the sender and receiver to join. A more efficient mechanism would facilitate payments from any sender to any receiver. Achieved through directories, standards or some other solution, ubiquity will be key to achieving the efficiency of all-electronic payments in the end-to-end value chain. Let me touch on one more possible form of efficiency; in my personal view, an efficient, faster, secure and ubiquitous payments mechanism (especially if it’s mobile) could significantly change the risks in payments.