This will involve: 1.  enhancing the timeliness, completeness and consistency of the quarterly euro area accounts, so that they become available within 90 days of the end of the reference period;  2.  compiling more accurate, frequent and timely statistics on assets and liabilities of investment funds from early next year (based on an ECB Regulation adopted in July 2007);  3.  compiling frequent, timely and harmonised statistics on insurance corporations and pension funds, which will become increasingly important in our ageing society;  4.  compiling comprehensive statistics on the securitisation of bank loans and the financial vehicle corporations which handle these securitisations, as well as improving the measurement of credit risk transfers, including credit default swaps, in close cooperation with bank supervisors;  5.  enhancing statistics on bank credit lines, bank balance sheets and interest rates on deposits and loans, for instance by gaining more insight into loan collateral; and  6.  looking at user requirements for micro-data, for example for household consumption and finance.
And this month marks just one year to go to our first key milestone on this journey: to move to the global standard for financial messaging in payments, ISO 20022 (on a like-for-like basis), in June 2022 for CHAPS. We will transition to enhanced ISO 20022 messaging in February 2023. And in September 2023, introduce a state-of-the-art core settlement engine: the heartbeat of the new RTGS service, and of the UK’s financial system. To achieve our milestones and to realise the benefits of RTGS renewal, we – and I mean all of us here today and the payments industry as a whole – must work together to be ready. We must turn excitement into action, following in the footsteps of our Neolithic predecessors to build an infrastructure for the future. An infrastructure that supports the needs of industry, the needs of their customers, and crucially the needs of the end users. The criticality and evolution of payments Payments sit at the heart of the financial system, and whilst the methods and nature of transactions have progressed considerably since the days of barley bartering, their importance has not faltered. Within the UK, payments are a crucial part of everyday life and the past decade especially has seen a transformation in how people pay for goods and services.