Bank for International Settlements selects Bank of England as the UK centre to host new FinTech hub.
On 30 June 2020, the Bank of England announced that it had been selected to host a centre of the Bank for International Settlements’ Innovation Hub. The UK centre will support the global central banking and finance community through the development of digital public goods.
The BIS Innovation Hub was established in 2019 to identify and develop in-depth insights into critical trends in financial technology of relevance to central banks, explore the development of public goods to enhance the functioning of the global financial system, and to serve as a focal point for a network of central bank experts on innovation. Among the projects currently under way are explorations into the development of regulatory and supervisory technological practices, the global payment stack, tokenisation, digitalisation of the trade process, and monitoring of fast-paced markets.
The Bank of England has stated that the UK centre will address issues of critical importance for the global financial system. Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, stated that the centre will provide an important venue to ensure the UK’s deep expertise in innovation can contribute to solving global financial issues. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, stated that the UK centre presents an invaluable opportunity to connect the expertise of the world’s central banks, working collaboratively on innovative new ways to enhance financial services.
London was among four newly announced locations, including the Bank of Canada (Toronto), the European Central Bank/Eurosystem (Frankfurt and Paris) and four Nordic central banks (Danmarks Nationalbank, the Central Bank of Iceland, the Central Bank of Norway, and Sveriges Riksbank) in Stockholm. The BIS will also form a strategic partnership with the Federal Reserve System (New York).
The expansion will build on the foundation already put in place by the first three Hub Centres – in Hong Kong SAR with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, Singapore with the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and Switzerland with the Swiss National Bank.
The BIS’s Annual Economic Report 2020 contains a special chapter on central banks and payments in the digital era.
