Safeguarding Trust and Monetary Sovereignty in a Digital Payments era

Good morning,

It is a great pleasure to be with you today at the Hong Kong Fintech Week.

This event provides a timely opportunity to reflect on the profound changes we observe today: the digitalization of payments and more broadly the tokenisation of finance and its associated distributed infrastructures. While they can unlock new opportunities for consumers, businesses and financial institutions, these innovations also bring new risks for the efficiency and safety of payments and supporting infrastructures, notably in challenging principles governing the monetary order that have long underpinned their functioning. An important determinant in my view of their actual impact will depend on the evolution of central banks’ policies and services, which may vary from one jurisdiction to another depending on locaI circumstances and policy priorities.

Against this background I would like to focus my remarks on the structural changes affecting the euro area landscape, the challenges they raise from the perspective of a central bank member of the Eurosystem and how we are adapting our policies and services to address them.