And there are now some 1.7 million credit card transactions involving $ billion every day. It is also noteworthy that for a small city of just over seven million people, Hong Kong has around 34 million Octopus cards in circulation, with an average of 14 million transactions per day. This means on average each person in Hong Kong makes two transactions by Octopus cards daily. Anyway, there are many new developments in the mobile payment market since we granted 13 stored value facility (SVF) licences in 2016. Second, I believe it unlikely that fintech firms will displace or replace traditional banks because, in addition to speed and convenience, customers also need protection of their life savings or investments. I have previously stated my view on the future landscape of banking and finance. I’ll say it again here. On the one hand, we will see more and more tech companies venturing into finance by riding on the highly successful and popular e-commerce, payment or social media platforms that they have developed. The paradigm of these newly emerged platforms is that it is highly “customer-centric”, meaning they design everything to provide what the customers want, taking care of many practical and life-style needs of customers. However, when it comes to finance, tech companies need to realise and accept that they have to earn the trust and confidence of customers if they wish to handle their savings and investments.
This new context has had several consequences: •  both inside and outside the euro area, the reputation of the euro as a solid currency has fostered the holding of euro-denominated banknotes, which has doubled in a few years, now representing the largest banknote circulation in the world;  •  the so-called “home bias” in asset holdings has decreased further, both inside the euro area vis-à-vis assets issued in other Member States and outside the euro area vis-à-vis assets issued in the euro area. This has increased globally the demand for euro-denominated financial assets;  •  the integration and competition in the banking and financial markets that has been fostered by the euro speeded up the development and the spreading out of financial innovation throughout the euro area, affecting money and credit developments in different ways. Let me just mention some of them. 6  2    One is the rapid pace of expansion in the activities of the so-called “other financial institutions” or OFIs. OFIs are not part of the money-creating sector and are neither insurance companies nor pension funds. In particular, they include financial vehicle corporations that purchase, pool and repackage as marketable securities loans that are “securitised” by banks, thereby reducing the growth rate of loans to the private sector. The expansion in OFIs’ activities is to a certain extent mirrored in the development of their monetary assets: which is now quite significant and amounts to around 10.5% of M3.