3  https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/future-finance Transforming data collection from the UK financial sector - Discussion Paper (bankofengland.co.uk) 5 Transforming data collection from the UK financial sector: a plan for 2021 and beyond | Bank of England 4  4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  4  These common standards can improve all aspects of the data collection process: how firms first find the data we are asking for; how they merge and consolidate data sets from different internal sources; how they submit and we receive data; and how they and we can compare data points that have been provided to us. But, just as in the middle ages commonly adopted measurement standards had benefits far beyond cathedral building, so common data standards are about much more than just improved reporting. Standards are a key part of the soft infrastructure of the digital age. They make it easier to source, move and compare data. They can make a whole range of activities easier: better financial reporting, cheaper payments, and more accurate credit scoring so customers get the financial products that suit their needs. They can boost transparency and help customers choose between competing products in a more informed way. They can support newer innovations like artificial intelligence and machine learning methods. In short, they bring benefits throughout the financial sector. The example of the Legal Entity Identifier  Of course the development of common standards and identifiers, and a role for authorities in helping develop those standards, is far from new.
And this was not just an English peculiarity: across the channel, a foot length in Strasbourg was 295 mm, a foot in Paris was 325 mm, but a foot in Bordeaux was a relative whopper at 344 mm1. Of course people came to understand the great benefits of enforcing universal, common standards. In part for maintaining the cathedrals themselves, so that new, replacement stones could be sourced that would fit snugly between their neighbours. But the benefits of universal measurement standards could be applied a long way beyond the niche discipline of cathedral building. Now some of you may think that today’s financial system is not perfectly comparable to the glorious gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages. But like those cathedrals, many of the data systems underpinning today’s financial firms and markets were built with narrow reference to their own needs, by their own master masons – their CIOs and systems architects. They too were closed systems. Each needed to be able to record, track and manipulate its data. Its data points needed to fit snugly alongside each other. But the design of each system often paid little attention – understandably – to any broader public good. In this speech, I want to talk about whether there are wider public benefits that might flow from standardising these data labels, and set out a way forward to reap those benefits collectively. So let me turn from mediaeval architecture to data. At a central bank like the Bank of England, data is our life blood.