Singapore's faster payment system is called PayNow. It is linked to a central addressing scheme that allows money to be sent to individuals using their mobile numbers as proxies and to businesses using their unique enterprise numbers. There is no need to share details of bank account numbers to receive payments. Linking the faster payment systems of countries is an efficient way to carry over the benefits of cheap, fast, seamless payments from the domestic to crossborder arena. Singapore has been actively working to connect our PayNow with the faster payment systems of other countries. We started with Thailand's PromptPay, with a bilateral linkage launched last year, and are now completing our linkages with India's Unified Payment Interface and Malaysia's DuitNow. These linkages allow users in Singapore and our partner jurisdiction to transfer funds directly to one another's bank accounts. But such bilateral linkages are time consuming and expensive to implement. The effort to connect each payment corridor in every region is not a trivial process. As one of our industry partners put it, three countries require three bilateral links but 20 countries would require 190 bilateral links. We need a multilateral solution to efficiently link up countries' faster payment systems. 2/8  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  The BIS Innovation Hub's Singapore Centre is developing a central platform for multilateral linkages to be built on countries' existing faster payments infrastructure. If successful, it will facilitate rapid scaling-up of retail payment systems connectivity. We call it Project Nexus.
In addition, digitalisation was regarded by firms as replacing low and medium-skilled jobs but not high-skilled jobs. 4  For more information, see European Investment Bank (2019): Investment Report 2018/2019. Retooling Europe´s Economy. 5 For more information, see ECB (2018): “Digitalisation and its impacto n the economy: insights from a survey of large companies”, ECB Economic Bulletin, Issue 7/2018 3/6  Intangible assets Today’s conference deals not only with digitalisation but also with intangible assets. Intangible assets are non-monetary assets without physical substance encompassing ICT, research and development (R&D), innovation, design, creativity, image and brand, organisation and human capital formation. The development of the digital economy has certainly contributed to a notable increase in investment in intangible assets, as digital firms tend to both invest and innovate more than non-digital firms. Also digital technologies have increased the demand for high-skill workers, increasing in this way the investment in intangibles. Partly as a result of digitalisation, the relative importance of intangible assets has been increasing in most economies6. But measurement of intangible assets is not straightforward, and their definition in the national accounts has gradually broadened. The current national accounts systems include as intangible assets computerised systems (software and databases), R&D, mineral exploration and entertainment, literary or artistic originals. Nevertheless, some authors7 claim that a broader range of assets should be included in the definition of intangible assets.