Well-crafted innovation can reduce market concentration, yield new risk-mitigating technologies, and increase the scope for electronic settlement in central bank money: all of which enhances, not reduces, financial stability. So we are open, not closed, to such advances. At the same time, we make no apologies for having a relentless focus on stability and resilience, and have 1  previously set out the criteria against which we assess change in the payments landscape . Indeed, households and companies expect nothing less. Surveys regularly show safety to be at the very top of people’s expectations from payments. No amount of real-time, API-enabled, mobile front ends can make up for the prospect – however remote – that one’s money might be lost or mislaid; or that a failure in one part of the payments network might bring down other parts of the banking system. Judged against those yardsticks, the UK’s payment systems have actually performed very well in recent years: combining the innovation of Faster Payments, Direct Debits and widespread use of online banking (to give just three examples) with a resilience record which – though by no means perfect – stands in contrast to some other parts of the financial system. So why the need for change? There is a one word answer to that, and that is: complexity. The UK has world-beating technologies. But too many sit in silos.
A payments strategy for the 21st century  Remarks made by Andrew Hauser, Executive Director, Banking, Payments and Financial Resilience  Payment Strategy Forum “Launch of the Final Strategy”, London 29 November 2016  1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you today at the launch of the PSF’s Payments Strategy st  for the 21 century. I want to start by emphasising that this is not the Bank of England’s strategy – or the UK authorities’ as a whole. And that in fact is its great merit: because it has been drawn up by a genuine partnership of those who actually provide and use retail payments services, with the interests of those users uppermost in their minds. But that doesn’t mean the Bank has been ‘hands off’, or lukewarm over the direction of travel. Quite the reverse. We have a deep interest in, and responsibility for, maintaining the stability of sterling payments. First, through our statutory responsibility for the supervision of the major payments schemes. Second, by ensuring that all material payments either settle in, or are backed by, central bank money – the safest form of settlement asset. And, third, through our role as member of some schemes as a bank in our own right. It is sometimes said that a focus on stability impedes innovation. But there is no reason why that has to be true.