Then, maybe you round off the day by some visits to your favourite online shops paying by choosing among the methods on offer. It is a complex piece of machinery that allows those payments to be made. In Sweden, this machinery is now undergoing what appears to be the largest overhaul in generations. The banks are working on modernising the entire retail payment infrastructure, harmonising it within the Nordics. And during next year, the  * I would like to thank Anders Mölgaard Pedersen and André Reslow for their help with writing this speech, and  Ann Börestam, Gabriela Guibourg, Eva Hellström, Elizabeth Nilsson, Tommy Persson, Björn Segendorff, Marianne Sterner, Johanna Stenkula von Rosen and Gary Watson for valuable comments. 1 To be precise, this speech is not only about payments, but touches upon also security settlement infrastructures. Not to bother you further with strenuous terms, I will be a little relaxed about my terminology and use ‘payment infrastructures’ also when I mean ‘financial market infrastructures’, etc. 1 [15]  Riksbank is launching a new service for settlement of instant payments that we call RIX-INST. Also, very recent, the Riksbank made a decision to take preparatory steps to connect Swedish krona to T2 and TARGET2-Securities, T2S. The latter are the Eurosystem’s platforms for large-value transfers between banks and settlement of security transactions, respectively. We will now perform an in-depth analysis of all relevant aspects that will provide the basis for deciding whether the Riksbank should enter into contractual negotiations with the Eurosystem.
Joining T2 and T2S is expected to benefit the participants of the Riksbank’s current settlement services. For instance, they will gain from increased cost-efficiency and harmonisation, that is, alignment with European standards and practices. In the end, that should also lead to improvements for banks’ customers. Importantly, a decision to connect to T2 and T2S should be taken into account by the Swedish banks in their future business and investment planning. My speech today will be about the Riksbank initiatives just referred to and the motives behind them. First, however, I plan to take you on a short tour of the history of payments. This is because I believe there are lessons to be learned here. Lessons that over time have formed the way that we at the Riksbank think about payments and the financial infrastructure in general. As such, they have played into also our recent decisions, of course. Looking at the past, the key observations that I make are the following:         Firstly, for a well-functioning monetary system the trust of money is key. A credible issuer can ensure this. Moreover, converging on one monetary unit in a given country, what economists refer to as the uniformity of money, increases simplicity and efficiency. Secondly, technological developments, often far away from payments, are an important driver of change. This goes hand in hand with innovation of ideas, humanity’s ability to react creatively to recognised needs. Sometimes this can even lead to the emergence of new types of business.