Our fourth and final PoC in this category, also announced today with Digital Reasoning will examine the extent to which analysis of the large quantities of weakly-structured textual data on regulated firms available from multiple public data sources can yield insights on intent and sentiment. The PoC will look at whether those insights are capable of complementing analysis of more formal data reporting. Cyber security (2 PoCs) The Bank, in common with other major financial institutions, spends a lot of time on cyber security – both for its own systems, and in terms of its requirements and expectations of regulated firms. Much of this takes place as part of the Bank’s core work programme, but a number of more exploratory exercises have taken place through the Accelerator. In particular, we undertook a PoC with BitSight aimed at assessing the extent to which a firm’s cyber resilience can be evaluated using publically available data. And we worked with Anomali and ThreatConnect to explore ways of consolidating threat intelligence into a format that can be used to optimise information collation, enrichment and sharing. 8  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  8  Non-PoC work of the FinTech Accelerator  In addition to enabling PoCs, the Accelerator team has also been able to leverage off the contacts and relationships made with firms and public authorities in the UK and overseas to provide a wider intelligence-gathering and horizon scanning function on FinTech to inform the Bank’s policy and operational work.
The rapid transformation of economic structure and the development of interbank markets and economic agents were coupled with fundamental changes in the monetary policy transmission mechanism. The latter has now become more complex, involving more players whose sophistication is ever-increasing, and incorporating more instruments and financial contracts that are timely structured and indexed to different indicators. The Albanian economy is now economically and financially integrated into the global economy, having the characteristics of a market economy but at the same time featuring the typical challenges of economic management that such an economy entails. These changes have called for the constant monitoring by the monetary authority in order to make the necessary changes in the monetary policy regime and the operational aspects of its implementation. Against this background, the Bank of Albania has been committed to a process of constant evaluation of the interbank market performance and at the same time fine-tune its monetary policy regime. The Monetary Policy Document for the 2009–2011 Period was a major step in this regard. In this Document, the role of monetary aggregates as indicators of inflationary pressures in economy and as intermediate targets of monetary policy was complemented with a wide range of information provided by the real sector of the economy, which is systemized and finalized in the inflation forecast performance. This change was entirely based on the Albanian experience.