To be clear, this is not going against the wish of Parliament in establishing these structures; rather, it is designed to reinforce that wish by making the pieces work closely together. And, it also emphasises that the Bank of England is a public policy institution with the overarching objective and responsibility of serving the public good. Interestingly, the language that we found to describe this public good comes from the Bank’s original Charter of 1694, though I should recognise that the detail of the description of what constituted the public good in 1694 is rather different from the one we have today. The key thing about a public good is that no individual or group of individuals can be excluded from using or consuming it, and use by one individual does not reduce the availability to others. Fresh air is a public good, and so is the stability of the economy. In our world, history shows that it takes a crisis to provide a decisive impetus to create and maintain the emphasis on the public good. Thus, stable low inflation – monetary stability – received its decisive impetus in many countries, including the UK from the painful experience of high inflation, most notably in the 1970’s. Out of that came a broad consensus on a central idea – low inflation is a necessary condition for stable economic growth and its resulting benefits for well-being.
First, the question of strategic independence of incumbents. If incumbents depend on BigTechs for key infrastructure such as cloud computing, if they rely on the same BigTech to 2/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  distribute their products through their platforms and then compete with BigTechs on certain segments, they see their strategic independence challenged in the same way as hotels and retailers did. This process of commoditization of incumbents may lower credit standards to compensate for higher pressure on margin and exacerbate the funding gap because of lower customer stickiness. Second, the question of cyber-risk. With greater interconnections between technologies and the financial system, cyber-risk is moving from an idiosyncratic risk to a potential source of systemic risk. Whether and how to address the type of issues I just mentioned is a challenging task from a regulatory and supervisory standpoint, as it involves an assessment of both the potential risks and benefits brought to the financial system and the economy more largely, which are by nature uncertain. It may give rise to a significant array of alternative courses of actions to  meet two key imperatives: ensure an adequate level of protection for participants and preserve the potential benefits brought by innovation. Let me illustrate this with crypto-assets. Because of incomplete information, a lack of data and the novelty of these monetary and financial objects, four options to tackle them from a public policy standpoint can be considered and have actually been under consideration to drive action: monitoring, isolating, regulating or banning.