Yves Mersch: Making Europe’s financial market infrastructure a bulwark of financial stability Speaking points by Mr Yves Mersch, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, for the Bank of France/Sciences Po research seminar “Financial stability in a digital world”, Paris, 7 June 2016. *  *  *  Introduction •  Europe’s financial market infrastructure has proved to be resilient through bouts of financial market volatility;  •  it has supported the liquidity and stability of financial markets in times of stress;  •  the European Central Bank and the Eurosystem, in conjunction with European legislators and market participants, have made Europe’s financial market infrastructure into the bulwark of financial stability it is today;  •  in the first part of my presentation, I will investigate the potential impact of the digitalisation of financial services on Europe’s market infrastructure;  •  in the second part, I will outline how the Eurosystem plans to deal with the technological and strategic challenges which affect our market infrastructure.
The White House believes that the commercial and technological environment is changing far too rapidly for it to be able to develop policy that is both timely and appropriate. In the near term, therefore, the White House is calling for case-by-case monitoring of electronic payments experiments. In keeping with the spirit of the White House Framework, Federal bank supervisors in the United States have expressed a clear willingness to listen to what the private sector has to say on issues involving emerging electronic payments. For example, in 1996 the Board of Governors issued proposed regulations concerning the applicability of Regulation E to stored-value cards. As part of that proposed rule making, the Board requested comments from the public as to whether part or all of Regulation E should apply to electronic money or value residing on a computer system or personal-computer hard drive. Similarly, the FDIC requested public comment on the application of Federal deposit-insurance coverage to electronic value represented on computer systems. This openness, combined with an increasing willingness to let the banking industry partner with technology and other industries, reflects a commitment on the part of bank supervisors in the United States to allow the private sector to direct the future of electronic commerce and payments. From a longer term perspective, however, the market-place and industry self-regulation alone may not fully address all of the issues associated with e-money.