John C Williams: Healthy workforce, healthy economy Remarks (via videoconference) by Mr John C Williams, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at Combating Food Insecurity: What’s Working – and What’s Scalable?, 30 November 2021. * * * As prepared for delivery Good morning, and welcome. We are pleased that so many of you have joined us today for this important discussion about food insecurity. It is not lost on me that we are holding this event just five days after Thanksgiving, a holiday that is largely centered around food—the turkey, the stuffing, the mashed potatoes, the pumpkin pie. For some of us, the big concern coming out of the weekend was whether we had eaten too much. But for far too many, the much bigger concern is that they and their families did not—and still do not—have enough to eat. That’s what brings us here today. Our mission at the New York Fed is to make the economy stronger and the financial system more stable for all. But we can’t have a healthy economy without a healthy workforce. And that is why health—along with household financial well-being and climate change—is a focal point for our Community Development team. Before I continue, I must give the standard Fed disclaimer that the views I express are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Open Market Committee or anyone else in the Federal Reserve System. Food insecurity has long been a systemic problem.
Findings on Important Business Services identification On IBS, our current view is that firms have generally made positive progress against our expectations for identifying these services. This is good to see and reflects well on the sector as a whole. We also know that firms have taken a wide variety of approaches to the granularity with which they have identified their IBS. To illustrate this I will use a couple of examples of different approaches we have seen. These represent only a small subset of the IBS that firms’ submitted but I think illustrate the point. So, taking payment services as one example, we saw that some firms have identified all types of payments as a single business service, whilst others have split out different types of payment (for example payments made via individual systems including BACS, CHAPS and Faster Payments). Others have gone in a different direction, for example differentiating services for credit card payments versus debit card transactions. We have seen similar themes in other areas, such as services to do with lending. Here some firms have taken a granular approach – for example listing services such as “obtaining a loan” and separating different types of loan – while other firms have kept their IBS at a higher level or gone in different directions by identifying different types of products and/or the split between preand post-trade execution.