Our overhaul of RTGS is helping to reduce complexity and costs in other areas as well. Take cross-border payments, where the Bank is leading by the adoption of emerging global standards for payments messaging and by working with other central banks and the private sector to explore the scope for cross-border payments in central bank money through synchronised national RTGS systems. This all could increase the speed and safety, as well as lower the costs, associated with cross-border transactions to support purchases and travel overseas. When coupled with the capture of richer payments data made possible by its renewal, RTGS will help support innovative services for the more effective management of personal and company finances. These benefits will be amplified by the UK’s ambition in implementing the Open Banking standard– under which the largest banks will be required to make customer data available to other existing firms and innovators, if the customer demands. In turn, this will help improve aggregator, comparison and switching services. Taken together, these advances will support innovation that allows you to manage your finances seamlessly, from tracking how much you spend on beer and books, to managing your future savings and current loans.
And the inability of the money supply to vary in response to demand would likely cause greater volatility in prices and real activity. 17 As the Italian philosopher George Santayana famously observed. 7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  7  In the short run, the fixed supply of Bitcoin has fed a global speculative mania that has encouraged a proliferation of new cryptocurrencies. As my colleague Agustin Carstens has argued, this surge of competitors and the “forking” of Bitcoin echoes the debasement of private monies in the past. 18  Inefficient Media of Exchange The most fundamental reason to be sceptical about the longer term value of cryptocurrencies is that it is not clear the extent to which they will ever become effective media of exchange. Currently, no major high street or online retailer accepts Bitcoin as payment in the UK, and only a handful of the top 500 US online retailers do. For those who can find someone willing to accept payment for goods and services in cryptocurrencies, the speed and cost of the transaction varies but it is generally slower and more expensive than payments in sterling. That’s because the more heavily used cryptocurrencies face severe capacity constraints compared with other payment systems. For example, Visa can process up to 65,000 transactions per second globally against just 7 per second for Bitcoin. And if you use a debit or credit card in the UK, the transaction is completed in seconds and without exchange rate risk.