Developing alternatives to Libor and similar benchmarks and encouraging their use has been a key priority of the international financial community since the Financial Stability Board, chaired by the Governor, published its report on interest rate benchmark reform in 2014. But the importance of this work has grown as it has become apparent that transactions underlying Libor are at best scarce. Resulting concerns about the 9  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  9  medium-term sustainability of Libor, set out in a speech by Andrew Bailey in the summer, highlight the need 5  for a transition away from Libor to alternative benchmarks. As we move to the next phase of benchmark reform work – a broad-based transition to SONIA – it is clear that active engagement will be needed from participants across all relevant sectors and markets. As a result, the Bank and FCA are currently finalising plans to broaden the mandate and membership of the Sterling Risk Free Rate Working Group. The second ongoing initiative I would like to draw attention to is the renewal of RTGS - which is the means by which central bank reserves are transferred between banks big and small, and settles around £ of transactions per day.
I also have a direct set of prescribed responsibilities under the Bank’s application to itself of the Senior Managers Regime – a framework developed to improve accountability at the top of financial services firms. As a key part of that accountability, over the coming years I look forward to giving many talks and speeches such as this one to set out the thinking behind decisions and their delivery across the full range of my and the Bank’s responsibilities. The Bank has quite rightly placed emphasis on the role of communication as a policy tool in its Vision 2020 strategy; describing our work to as diverse a range of people as possible. Of course I start this new role at an interesting point in time. It is nearly 17 months since the UK voted to leave the EU, and just over 16 months until that decision takes effect in March 2019. In the period since the referendum we have learned that while Brexit was at one level a binary decision, there are many potential outcomes, and paths to those outcomes. Perhaps reflecting this multidimensionality, uncertainty about Brexit seems to be increasing rather than diminishing over time (Slide 1). In the Bank’s Decision Maker Panel Survey (which is run jointly with Nottingham University), the share of firms who placed Brexit among the top sources of uncertainty rose from 35% in a survey taken in September 2016 to 40% in August this year.