And at the Bank of England, we had recently created a directorate dedicated to ensuring financial market infrastructure, including payment systems, meet the necessary standards of robustness and resilience. Overall the pace of technical, structural and regulatory change in payments was poised to pick up. And I have not been disappointed with the level of ambition and innovation we have seen in the past three years. Collectively, we have been on a journey; inching and in some cases taking great strides towards a payments landscape that is competitive, resilient and ready for the future. But, while considerable progress has been made, the journey to best in class payments is far from complete. Whilst important milestones have been reached, many more lie ahead. For example, one catalyst for change in UK retail payments was the creation of the Payments Strategy Forum (PSF) in March of 2015. And, with the formal consolidation of the Bacs and Faster Payments systems into the New Payment System Operator (NPSO) just last month, we can say that a key recommendation of the PSF has been delivered. But the NPSO now needs to turn its attention to developing and implementing the remaining critical recommendations which I will come on to discuss. We now need, collectively, to refocus our energies for the next leg of this journey towards best in class payments.
One of our colleagues did not meet these high standards recently. Our newly appointed Deputy Governor for Markets and Banking, Charlotte Hogg had previously not disclosed a relevant family relationship, as was required under our staff Code of Conduct. For those who have questioned whether we “get it”, we do. We know this honest mistake was also a serious mistake – one that was compounded by the fact that Charlotte Hogg had overseen the development of our new Code. We were clear upfront that there must be consequences for both her and the Bank. Our minimum response would obviously be what we would expect to see in the firms that we supervise. Let’s be absolutely clear about this baseline. In analogous situations in the private sector, we expect:   Evidence that the firm is taking the matter seriously;    Proportionate consequences for the individual, including some form of disciplinary warning and possibly some impact on remuneration; and    A wider review of lessons learned if there was any evidence that there was a systemic problem. 9  See page 16, Financial Reporting Council (FRC), “Corporate Culture and the Role of Boards: Report of observations”, July 2016. See Footnote 7 for details. With appropriate modifications to reflect the fact that it has a very different range of functions to a commercial bank and is accountable to a different range of stakeholders, including Parliament.