Mark Carney previews “new Bank of England” moves to support fintech

Speaking at the opening of the Innovate Finance Global Summit, part of UK Fintech Week, the Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney spoke about initiatives the Bank is undertaking to supercharge fintech innovation.

“The Bank’s strategy is to enable innovation and empower competition, while ensuring monetary and financial stability,” Carney told attendees.

“A new finance with products that are more cost effective, better tailored, and more inclusive.”

One such way he detailed is the ongoing rebuild of the Bank’s real-time gross settlement (RTGS) platform, which helps commercial banks process over £600bn in payments every day, but which is now being rebuilt to let smaller fintech players plug-in directly.

“That made sense in the old financial world arranged around a series of hubs and spokes but it is increasingly anachronistic in the new, distributed finance that is emerging,” said Carney.

“Responding to demands from fintech providers, the rebuild will provide API access to read and write payment data.”

Another example he gave is how the bank is overhauling its rulebooks by using the same technologies that fintechs use.

With advanced analytics and machine learning, Carney said the bank is analysing the PRA rulebook, which at over 638,000 words is longer than War and Peace, “to identify ways to simplify our rules, and to make compliance with them easier for firms.”

He also revealed that the Bank is running a regulatory reporting pilot with the FCA “on machine readable reporting requirements that firms’ systems could interpret and ultimately automate regulatory data collection.”

“By adapting our hard and soft infrastructure, the Bank of England will help create the conditions for such innovation to flourish to promote the good of all the people of the United Kingdom.”