6  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  6  The Right Hard Infrastructure A second, related example is how the Bank is working to develop the financial system’s hard infrastructure to allow innovation to thrive while keeping the system safe. Specifically, the Bank is widening access to some of its systems to include PSPs in order to boost both competition and system resilience. The UK has led the world in innovation in the wider payments ecosystem. And we are committed to keeping pace with customer demands for payments that are seamless, reliable, cheap, and ubiquitous. Our challenge is how to satisfy these expectations while maintaining a resilient payment systems infrastructure. That’s important because the Bank operates the UK’s high-value payment system ’RTGS’ which each day processes £ trillion of payments on behalf of everyone from homeowners to global banks. Understandably, we have an extremely low tolerance for any threat to the integrity of the system’s “plumbing”. Currently, only 52 institutions have settlement accounts in RTGS. Indirect users of the system typically access settlement via one of four agent banks. These indirect users include 1000 non-bank PSPs at the front-end of the financial services value chain. As they grow, some PSPs want to reduce their reliance on the systems, service levels, risk appetite and frankly goodwill of the very banks with whom they are competing. The Bank has decided to widen access to RTGS to include non-bank PSPs in order to help them compete on a level playing field with banks.
We are then using our existing frameworks to respond where necessary. We are disciplined. Just because something is new doesn’t mean it should be treated differently. Similarly, just because it is outside the regulatory perimeter doesn’t mean it needs to be brought inside. We apply consistent approaches to activities that give rise to the same risks regardless of whether those are undertaken by old regulated or new FinTech firms. Some of the most important questions we are considering include: -  Which FinTech activities constitute traditional banking activities by another name and should be regulated as such? 7  -  How could developments change the safety and soundness of existing regulated firms? -  How could developments change potential macroeconomic and macrofinancial dynamics including disruptions to systemically important markets? And  5  For further details on the New Bank Start-Up Unit, see: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/pra/nbsu/Pages/default.aspx For further detail on the work of our FinTech Accelerator see: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/Pages/fintech/default.aspx Systemic risks associated with credit intermediation including maturity transformation, leverage and liquidity mismatch should be regulated consistently regardless of the delivery mechanism. 6 7  4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  4  -  What could be the implications for the level of cyber and operational risks faced by regulated firms and the financial system as a whole? To illustrate some of the issues, consider how FinTech is affecting the financial services value chain (Figure 1).