3  3  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  3  And all these systems in the UK – whether card or bank payment – still depend on existing core infrastructure meaning they either carry the associated costs and limitations on speed or they require the right point of sale infrastructure for their full benefits to be realised. The scope for improving cross border payments is bigger still. These can cost up to 10 times their domestic equivalent.9 Anti-money laundering checks that are rightly required can be cumbersome, and settlement is slow with money taking up to a week to reach the recipient. Most fundamentally, the new payment system must end the inequity that the people with the least money pay the most for financial services. The revolution of payments may not be driven by the old bank-based systems but by a new architecture. Major changes are on the horizon, bringing enormous advantages but also more than a few new challenges. That’s why the Bank fully supports the Payments Strategy Review the Chancellor has launched this evening. To support private innovation and to empower competition, the Bank is levelling the playing field between old and new. This means allowing competitors access to the same resources as incumbents while holding the same risks to the same standards. The Bank is in the midst of an ambitious rebuild of its Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system, which processes £ billion of payments on average every day.
These situations require robust governance at board level. 22  IDC: Wordlwide Semiannual AI Systems Spending Guide (March 2019). See: https://www.bis.org/review/r180727a.pdf and Finastra, FTI Consuting Survey 2019. 24 McKinsey & Company research for the Future of Finance review. 23  8  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  8  To ensure that the benefits of cloud computing are realised and the associated risks are well managed, the PRA will issue a Supervisory Statement in the autumn that sets out its supervisory approach. The Bank, together with the FCA, will also establish a forum to discuss the results of a survey that it has conducted on AI use in finance and determine an appropriate supervisory approach. The Bank’s management and analysis of data is critical to our effectiveness as regulators and to the City’s competitiveness. The Bank now receives 65 billion data points each year of firm-related information. To put that into context, reviewing it all would be the equivalent of each supervisor reading the complete works of Shakespeare twice a week, every week of the year. For firms, while the Cloud and AI have reduced the costs of storage and analysis, producing regulatory submissions is still labour intensive and costs the industry an estimated £ billion per year.25 This is the new frontier of regulatory efficiency and effectiveness. The PRA is exploring how new technologies could streamline firms’ compliance and regulatory processes while improving our ability to analyse relevant data.