But on many occasions, and compared with this simple representation, experiments suggest that people focus excessively on the present. It’s not just that they generally place higher value on getting something sooner rather than later: people seem to put a particularly high weight on current outcomes. They seem to discount the importance of what comes tomorrow, relative to today, more heavily than they do any two successive days further into the future. This is referred to in the economic jargon as “hyperbolic discounting” and by psychologists as “present bias”. It helps to explain why we often put things off right until the last minute, even if the cost of doing it is much higher by that time. It means it can be advantageous to commit to things that are good for you over the longer term – regular saving, or signing up to a gym programme – but that, when the time comes, you might be tempted to avoid.2 And it can also explain why people borrow money, and roll over those debts, even at very high interest rates. This borrowing can take many forms, including foregoing opportunities to reduce the longer-term cost of something. In their recent book “Scarcity”, economist Sendhil Mullainathan and psychologist Eldar Shafir give the example of rag collectors in India – people who rely on collecting discarded clothes and selling them on. It is an ardous job with very little reward.
Subjects under analysis are, for instance, the implications of the provisions of the new Directive on payment services, known as PSD2, whose partial transposition in Spain is imminent, under the Government’s Annual Regulatory Plan, and to which I shall shortly refer. And there are also other topical matters, such as distributed ledger technology, “cloud” computing and the phenomenon of sovereign digital currencies. 3/8  Against this backdrop, the aim of my address is to offer some observations as to how the new technologies are changing the traditional bank-customer relationship, and to highlight the need for banks and customers to responsibly manage this new scenario. Likewise, I wish to stress the importance of financial education in this new scenario. Customers have more options, but also more responsibility, and it is essential they should be aware of this. Returning to the origins of the concern for the rights of bank customers. To set these observations in perspective, we might recall that concern in Spain to safeguard customer rights arose in the 1980s, as a consequence of the liberalisation the industry underwent and which enshrined freedom of contract – of interest rates and commissions – at the core of its workings. Accompanying this process, legislators adopted a series of measures aimed at boosting competition among banks, including most notably the enhanced comparative information with which banks must provide their customers, so that they may know the content of their rights and obligations before and once they have given their consent.