Ravi Menon: Singapore’s financial centre – resilience, dynamism, trust Speech by Mr Ravi Menon, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, to the Foreign Correspondents Association of Singapore, Singapore, 6 September 2016. *  *  *  Good afternoon. I accepted your invitation to speak not without some trepidation. •  The Foreign Correspondents Association in any country makes for a formidable audience. •  But I figured that if you were going to write about Singapore’s financial sector or economy, it might as well be with at least some residue at the back of your minds of what MAS has to say. •  In any case, having partaken of your generous luncheon meal, it is too late to escape now. Before I go any further, some disclosures: •  If you came for this luncheon expecting to hear about 1MDB, I am sorry I will not be mentioning that word or anything associated with it for the rest of my remarks. •  I am also sorry I have no juicy announcements to make. For central bankers and regulators, no news is generally good news. •  So, if you want to slip away quietly, now would be a good time to do so. I will pretend I did not notice. This afternoon, I want to share my thoughts with you on how the MAS sees the financial sector. Many of you, especially from abroad, are sometimes intrigued by MAS’ role as both regulator and developer of the financial sector.
Now, onto this scene lands crypto and digital money. Note, I did not describe crypto – in its unbacked form – as money. It isn't. For money to fulfil its function as a means of  2/6  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  payment it requires stability of value. This is clearly not true of unbacked crypto. It could be a bet, a highly speculative investment or a collectible, but note that it has no intrinsic value, so buyer be very aware. More interesting is the creation of so-called 'stable coins' or digital currency, which purport at least to be money as a means of payment. But, as we have seen, they do not have assured value, and in the work we have done at the Bank of England we have concluded that the public should expect assured value in digital money, and confidence in this is needed to underpin financial stability. For stable coins to function as money they will need to have the characteristics of, and be regulated as, inside money. Meanwhile, a lot of work is going on to assess the future of digital money, including Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Digital money is not new. Digital money in the form of commercial bank deposits and commercial bank reserves at the central bank have existed for many decades. What is new is the idea of broadly available retail digital money.