The impact of these investments are becoming increasingly visible – banking without branches, investing without brokers, paying without paper. Technological advancements are also redefining the landscape of finance in ways that we are only beginning to understand. Distributed ledger technology offers the potential to transform longstanding practices in areas such as correspondent banking, trade finance and remittances. Big data analytics continues to uncover new ways to understand and access untapped markets. Innovations in mobile technology are also challenging the status quo, particularly in the area of payments. Alipay and Tenpay quickly come to mind as examples of companies that took a single 1/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  mobile app and went on to build an international ecosystem from scratch. These trends are now increasingly commonplace across the globe, driven by a multitude of factors – from the drive to improve efficiencies, deliver a superior customer experience, break into new markets, or combat fraud. In the face of these tectonic shifts, most of us are finding ourselves in unchartered waters. Within the central bank, we are doing work across a range of issues that we believe will be important to inform our thinking on digital developments, both in the financial sector and the broader economy. Within your own institutions, I trust this is also the case. In that sense, we share a common interest – to keep our sights fixed on the future so that we can step forward confidently.
We may be aided by our understanding of the common factors shared by past financial crises, and how lessons from the past have helped to shape the current policy. But always, there will be other or new challenges that will be difficult for us to anticipate or be aware of. With these in mind, let me share with you my thoughts on some of these issues. First, on the causes of financial crisis. According to a well-known study by Reinhart and Rogoff in 2008, financial crises in the past, dated back to the 1800s, shared many common causes. Chief among these are macroeconomic imbalances and the roles played by large and persistent capital flows, asset price bubbles, and credit boom. Although, compared with the Asian financial crisis, the current crisis does differ in terms of the impact, the scale, and the role played by financial innovation, but the two crises, nonetheless, do share many of the common factors mentioned above. For example, in the case of asset price and credit boom, the real house price in the U.S. increased by more than 40 percent between 2002 and 2006, while U.S. loan growth, particularly mortgage loans, accelerated during the same period. These signs were also present in East Asia before the 1997 crisis.