31.10.2022  Remarks at the Conference “Building resilience in uncertain times: safeguarding financial stability, encouraging investments” 2022 Conference of Mediterranean Central Banks/Banco de España, Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye, OECD and European Institute of the Mediterranean Pablo Hernández de Cos Governor  Good morning ladies and gentlemen. It is a great pleasure for me to welcome you all to this Conference on Building resilience in uncertain times: safeguarding financial stability, encouraging investments. We could not have asked for a more delightful setting for this Conference than this beautiful city of Istanbul. Let me start by thanking our colleagues from the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye, the OECD and the European Institute of the Mediterranean (IEMed) and, in particular, Governor Kavcıoğlu, Ambassador Florensa and Achraf Bouali for jointly organising this Conference. I would like to especially emphasise the decisive commitment of IEMed, thanks to which we are now opening the seventh edition of this Conference, which is becoming a reference among the fora for dialogue and cooperation in economic and financial relationships in the Euro-Mediterranean region. The last edition of this conference was held in June 2021 in a fully virtual format, as we were in the middle of the pandemic. On that occasion, an incipient recovery was taking place and there was optimism about the outlook, given the good progress made with vaccination. However, almost a year and a half later, even if we have returned to a face-to-face event, we are once again in a highly uncertain environment.
See, C. Toloba and J. M. del Río (2020) “The outlook for the digitalisation of Spanish banks: risks and opportunities”, Financial Stability Review, Issue 38, Spring. 3  necessary.3 It is precisely for this reason that a few years ago the European Banking Authority came up with a set of Recommendations aimed at cloud outsourcing activities.4 This example proves once again the fundamental role that central banks and financial authorities should play in the current digital context, including developing a proactive stance towards digitalisation with a view to ensuring that the latter can take place in an orderly manner. On the one hand, central banks need to boost their understanding of the changes that the industry is now experiencing and how these are likely to impact its present and future structure, and also to identify potential sources of risk for financial stability. Enhancing stakeholder engagement appears to be a cornerstone for achieving this objective. Furthermore, they must be ready to move ahead in deploying tailored, swift and proportionate responses as needed. A very good example of this is the work that both the BCBS and the FSB are steering in terms of assessing the vulnerabilities of crypto-assets and the potential practical strategies to address them in a cohesive way across borders. In addition, financial authorities may wish to show greater ambition and explore how emerging technology can help enhance the way they fulfil their supervisory, oversight or market conduct tasks, to name just a few.