 Mae'r drin, tein coffing, water, or wine, please do it. Mae'r ffood, well, who knew, so please do eat some food, it's just arrived, so it's over there by the tein coffing. Feel free to go grab some. Fawr, fawr, fawr. "- gweithio at hyn a'n hyn sydd mewn ffordd, ond mae'n ddiddordeb sy'n ceisio gwyllgor yn agorion. Mae gennym am ni, ac rydw i'n gwneud o hoffi gwydol iawn yma, felly rydw i sut lnych chi'n gyfyrdd i'r ffordd o ran i ymddiol. Roes siaradu fod yn y gwaith, mae'n ymddir iawn i ymddir, Mae'n gweithio chyfeirio'r prif. Tyniadwch Ffram Vwyt, ac ar edrych am wir yng Nghymru Cymru ac mae'r gwasanaeth cerddau mwy o hir cadw meddwl gweithio'i ag meddwl ysgrifethee. Rwy'n ymdweithio'r ffordd. Rwy'n e-mae gweithiau ffordd y 110 ym mhôr o heti ddarparu gyllideu yn gwcomodol a lydym o'n cymh оedd y sector ffaith ond mae ddim yn ei gwirionedd gyda'r agwn syniogwyd, ydych chi'n gwirionedd ac arlygiad ac we've kind of grown since then to become a more established money and banking reform organisation in the civil society sector. Our mission is to reform money and banking so it enables a fair, democratic and sustainable economy. We think that we're a bit far away from that as it stands. Ond ydych yn trafnod, yr ystod, rydyn ni wedi bod gennym yn cynllun yn deallu am y Dyn Eightgwrs. Yn gyntaf, nid â'r Dyn Eightgwrs piliad ystod, ac rhywbeth yn gyrhaf i ni'n gweithio eich swydiad yn siŵr, ac hefyd yn diolch i'r eu amser yn awr o'r pannu â'r Worlds yn gyda chi,Because in the U?We've seen since, we're actually 11 years since the trash, and since 2010. We've had successive Conservatives of chancellers presiding over quite big changes to the UK banking system we've seen it become easier for customers to switch their current accounts and give consumers more power over their data. But 10 years after we still see in the UK a sector that is heavily dominated by a hand poll ...a warthwyr, gweithio i'r rai'r seithgol gwaith... ...ac yn cael ei gwirioneddau i blwyddiannol... ...y'r pryd fit prydau gwirionedd... ...y ffordd gyffredinol ac yn wneud maen nhw'n gweithio arall... ...a'i pobwylliau a'u ceisio cyllidydd. Rydym ni wedi bod nhw'n gweithio... ...yng Ng willig i ddweithio i'r busnes. Felly, byddwn i gydag yn y cyfreithio cyllidydd... ...y'n bod yn gwneud ar gyfer yn ei cyfrifoedd... ymdduns espいます How do we get that? What are the kind of new models, banking that could disrupt the system, challenge some of the big players? We're really pleased to be hosting this session with Trudeaus Bank. We hosted another event at the Labour party conference last week with them. They are a front runner in their sustainable banking globally. It is an independent banker that promotes responsible and transparent banking a rydw i am wneud i chi i'n gyffinifu James Macauro, ac efallai ydy'r amser cyfle yma ar y bank, ac yn ymwneud ar gyfer cyfrifio y Cymru, byddwn i'r cynynno yma, yr ysgrifennu yma ar gyfer cyfrifio ymwneud. Mae rôl i'r cyfrifio ar y New York ar hyn yn ymgyrch, ac rôl i'r cyfrifio cyfrifio cyfrifio cyfrifio cyfrifio cyfrifio cyfrifio. Mae'n rhaid i'n gweithio â'r drefnol byth, Philip Raugh, He is a director of Res Publica, which founded in 2009. He's been internationally recognised as a political thinker and social and economic commentator, and prior to entering politics and public policy, talk theology and philosophy exeter and coming up. He's the author of Red Tory, which sought to redefine the centre ground of British politics around the ideas of civil associations, mutual ownership and shared enterprise. And we're joined by Rebecca, who's responsible for UK Finance's Media & Coms programme and government affairs strategy in the UK and internationally. Prior to joining UK Finance and the BVA, Rebecca works as a solicitor and previously in the Conservative Party's international office. And we're obviously aware we've probably got a lot more expertise in the audience so if positive money likes to do things as participatory as possible, we'll be asking you to feed in once we've heard from the panel. And I might even be interjecting some questions from positive money and support debates because we are a people-powered organisation. But first of all, we're going to hear from our panellist, Rebecca, if you're happy to kick us up. Absolutely, thank you. So ahead of this afternoon, I think I was asked the questions to talk on what is the social value of the banking sector in the UK. For me, that's a topic that really has to be clearly talked about to find because we are terrible as an industry about talking about the social value of what we do and actually that there is value in what we do. And I think too often as a sector, we take it for granted that people think having a large banking sector is economically beneficial, is good for society. And actually, there are many different most in the UK that would quite happily see the UK banking sector smaller or relocated or undertaking a different kind of activity. So why do we have a right to exist? Why should we be here in the UK? And is what we're doing actually good for the UK? And so what I wanted to talk about today was two areas for you. One was the purpose and value of the industry in terms of what we do. And then secondly, what more do we need to continue growing that value and being beneficial? And in that second part, this isn't going to be the industry kind of going, we need less regulation, we need to pay a lower taxes. Actually, we think the best thing for the UK is if we have a well and strong and transparent and highly regulated industry that people trust and in that trust that is how we grow what we do here. But what about banking sector? I mean, is it actually a force for good? Can it ever be a force for good? Firstly, I would say yes, because the banking sector is no longer driven by shareholder value. Last month, the business round table, an organisation of multinational CEOs came together to say for the first time, actually, shareholder value shouldn't be our primary aim. Instead, companies should focus on the value they deliver for all stakeholders. So how does the finance and banking sector really demonstrate that the app is beyond its own narrow self-interest and that of capital providers? Why should the UK be happy about continuing to have this world-leading sector on our shores? Well, I would say that the UK services sector does deliver the whole economy. It's an industry which provides SMEs and the finance they need to grow. 58 billion was lent to SMEs last year. 8 out of 10 SMEs that come forward and ask for finance to get the financing they need from the banking sector. That's 80%. And that is probably about the right figure. If you talk to the business community and to business groups, not every company that comes for finance is viable and nor should we seek to lend to businesses that aren't viable, but we need to rebuild the confidence between the banking sector and the SME sector so that the right SMEs and more SMEs come forward. We have a crisis of confidence in that part of the market where some SMEs don't feel they should ever ask for finance and we need to focus on rebuilding that class because actually where we do build those relationships between banks and SME customers, actually we can build a very strong and valuable flow of not just finance but mentoring, guidance and support. But we're also an industry that exists to help families and homeowners. 1.2 trillion in mortgage lending to homeowners last year. The numbers get too big that they almost become meaningless. But if you think about the number of people that need to get a home in terms of ownership and can drive forward that level of wealth in the UK economy, it's absolutely critical that the sector continues to work in that space and continues to do so responsibly. But it's also areas where we don't necessarily think about banking. So this sector last year stopped every two in three pounds of attempted fraud. So we all know that fraud is now the UK's single biggest crime and one of its fastest growing crimes and actually as an industry we have a real responsibility and purpose in ensuring that we help protect customers from that economic crime and if we're stopping two thirds of attempted fraud then that has to be a key part of what drives us forward in what we do. It's effectively 1.7 billion in terms of economic activity. We're preventing going to criminals to invest in drugs or other activities such as human trafficking. Usually the sector sits here and talks about how much tax we pay and how many people we employ. Those are important core parts of our economic value but it shouldn't be what drives our purpose and it shouldn't be what drives how we think we should be taking our business activity forward. Often some of the things that we don't talk about is the work going alongside that core economic interest. So thinking about some of the industry initiatives we've been working on and supporting with our member firms over recent years. Well I know that we're all waiting for the domestic abuse bill to go forward and through Parliament and hopefully with the prorogatio ended we'll now see that activity being taken forward. One of the things we've been working on is the financial abuse code of conduct so that firms can improve how they identify those who are at risk of financial abuse and economic control and help them to seek access to the right support and to regain control of their money. We've been working with consumer groups and representatives right across the industry to implement that work and put in place some really important steps to help people in those circumstances. We've also introduced the authorised push payment voluntary code which is a terribly known initiative but effectively what it means is if someone is tricked out of their money and they end up transferring it to you a scammer rather than a genuine person we will reimburse that money to the customer regardless of whether we can track it and trace it through the system and it sets out the rules by which we will make that reimbursement. There isn't a mandated change required by the regulator or by government actually in many ways it would be much easier for us to implement if it had been forced on the industry. That was a voluntary initiative that the industry worked with consumer groups and with others to take forward and implement. It's been in place for a couple of months now and it's being funded by the industry to be put in place permanently but I think it's just one example that if the industry understands it didn't always get things right and I'm never going to sit or stand on a platform sector has always conducted itself in a way that people expect but I think there is now an acceptance that the values and the cultures behind these institutions does need to change and does need to acknowledge people's concerns about the sector and these are some of the issues that we've seen bring forward. We also talked about access at the start here whether that's access to branches or cash for ATM networks and I think this is a really important debate that the industry has to have because fundamentally we are in many respects and we provide core access to bank accounts and to money and we need to ensure that we get that right. This morning we launched our Access to Cash initiative as UK Finance which is an industry commitment to help local communities identify the source of cash and access to cash that they need so that we can build the right sustainable framework for local areas to identify that important access because one of the challenges we have right now is people are choosing to use less cash I think the latest data says that every month a typical customer uses their debit card 28 times but cash only 11 times and if that cash usage is declining it's hard to ensure that the infrastructure stays sustainable now rather than just allow that infrastructure to fall away we as an industry need to work together to find a way to build the right sustainable platform which means people can access cash because it's critical that for some people that is the only way that they choose to manage their money and they need to be able to take that forward and finally I just wanted to comment on climate and the UN business principles which were launched last weekend we at UK Finance signed up last week it's the first industry club in the UK to make that commitment and we'll be encouraging all of the banks and firms that participate in our organisation to sign up for those because I think we do have a real responsibility and ability to drive forward an important change when it comes to climate and how we manage that going forward so I couldn't agree more with the importance of backing that initiative so for us, for me that is why I think the sector is valuable I don't think we're very good at telling a story I think too often we just focus on the city and allow people to think about the markets and what's going on and too often we're portrayed as wanting to seek lower regulation but from our perspective we would love to see a government agenda that actually enables the smaller banks and the new banks that have been created to build their business models with a more proportionate approach so that they can grow and actually compete against some of the more traditional incumbent firms that exist in the market and with that kind of force of thought I won't stop there, thank you so much I'll have it a lot of ground there and if I'm going to pass over to Jamie Hi everyone I'm representing Treados Bank and in terms of the whole thing in terms of being fit for purpose Treados Bank for those who don't know was a bank that started with a very different purpose so you hear now of banks that set up to start up to become a challenger bank it's a kind of challenge for market share we set it as a bank as a challenger bank to challenge the paradigm of banking and what it really fundamentally was so it came out of a speaking group discussion of people who were in the financial sector and going what is the purpose? what is it that we're meant to be doing an institution which effectively is giving credit into the economy what is it where we're wanting to do here what is it that we want to bring into that economy and what is fundamentally helping it started with that question we became a bank start from the Netherlands came here in 1995 I joined in 1998 so it's been just an early 22 years with the bank specifically looking at where are the ideas that could be in the economy which are driving positive impact social environmental and cultural change things that people really value we were trying to figure out what is it that we need to do as a bank to be able to make that happen so we got involved in lots of initiatives with renewable energy organic farming, social housing, social care all of our projects that we lend money to are on our website that proposition isn't just because we want to kind of burden ourselves it's because it's important for everybody to be able to be conscious and aware of what they're doing so they become more free to act and that's something which is kind of underlying our principles when I started 20 years ago I was the only person who was called in the United Kingdom if you wanted a wind farm alone and you weren't in utility because it was seen as it was definitely ignored, it was in the shadow of some way it was seen as alternative energy everything was alternative that we did as opposed to ethical and sustainable and now kind of just the market and that's been the story mirrored in terms of how Treador's bank has been regarded, I think at first we were sidelined after the financial crisis and the fact that we had not just kind of a good profile and good customer relations but consistent returns not a level that others have before the product but very consistent different returns from doing real economy business we were taken notice of but then still people would say this isn't really a proper bank or whatever and then actually now the markets which we've been in in terms of environmental and social business really kind of coming to the forefront of what people recognise is what's needed in the future from the climate crisis and also multiple planetary crisis on environmental a lot of social systems under huge stress and at crisis point needing to channel money now into those sectors seen as the only business which banking could be doing which is healthy we've gone full sort of cycle into a time when there are and there have been and there were many of the major UK banks not all of them yet but many signed on to the UN principles banking which will drive them to work with stakeholders to say where do we actually have our biggest impacts what could we be doing there and what targets we set to be able to be accountable for those targets others have got a long way to go it's the first meaningful commitment so it feels like we've gone through that cycle as Gamby said first they ignore you then they really kill you then they fight you then you win the post script probably is then they probably claim it was all their idea it's the first place we're going through that right now and that's on the market side but on banking reform we've had a whole wave of regulations present crash where banking regulators have been trying to get to grips with how do you keep banking safe a lot of regulations have focused on the specific boundaries and the perimeter of an institution you've got your savings in an institution where do those savings go let's just have a look at what's happening within that bank the controls and the checking there's many risks fraud, risk prevention all sorts of things which didn't exist 20 years ago to the degree they do now but one of the things which is most fundamentally missing right now which is the boundary is being able to recognise the banking system in a broader context so to quote a left leaning economist John Maynard Cain said in the long run we're all dead but he's still an economist so we in that sentence are still we individually we each of them, not we collectively because economists don't really look that much at the collective and if you take something like a climate crisis when I've just come back from New York current science is that we might be tripping into a 1.5 degree world within the next three years and a 2 degree world within the next 7 to 8 years and we have to understand that there is no banking sector there's no economy in some of the things which kind of get triggered by those kind of climate scenarios likewise in different planetary scenarios so what regulates is that governments who give the mandates for regulators need to think about is beyond just the perimeter of a bank and keeping the bank's processes safe individually what do they need to be doing within the economy collectively that's a wider mandate to quote Clayton Christensen the strategist what is the job of work that we're asking our banks to be doing right now for sure they are I mean they are still on the capital market I mean there's something saying well they can be passed through just being a shareholder value I'm not sure it's totally part of being a shareholder value I think there's progress despite the fact that the dominant mandate that the CEO is going to spill to please capital markets we've got a very different ownership structure and trails which helps us to set a different course to manage payments I'd agree with Rebecca I think that a lot of what banks do right now is a utility it may be better managed as a public utility it shouldn't be able to get cash actually why should that be a private enterprise in fact everybody relies upon it it might be better and easier for banks and easier for the public if that wasn't managed as a utility function keeping saving safe I mean that's in a way what we're wanting to do but how do you do that as a bank which is lending money well we've had a mandate to sort of save the world we've sort of made them a bit ridiculed by the time but perhaps the only way of keeping saving safe is by saving looking to save the planet so look at the impact that is made as a result of lending through all of those activities and thinking what does this all add up to because if it doesn't add up to something which can actually transition us in the economy right now which is needy I mean you think about the amount of infrastructure to build in this country in various planetary scenarios I'll make it more realistic we're not that many metres above sea level right now we've just revised the projections for the Greenland ice shoes from a very low probability of melting by 2040 to a medium to high level of melting by 2040 that's a 7 metre sea level rise we're bickering now about the things which are kind of going on in the country in terms of what we need to do how are we going to mobilise infrastructure and build that quickly how are we going to make sure that pension funds banks are doing those kind of things because unless we transition to that none of our savings can possibly be saved there's a very big conversation happening on financial stability risk so climate change is a financial stability risk and obviously we've been feeding into that but I guess you have to ask yourself a question then the city of London in New York is under water probably your economy at large is kind of being quite difficult to get going again so we've been trying to push the bank of England on that a little bit it'd be great to bring in your thoughts maybe some political thoughts as well sure let me start from a slightly different place which is a description of where I think we are and I want to start from what other people have mentioned inequality and the inequality that we now face so I remember back in 2010 Eric Harman did an inequality survey and roughly speaking for income the income between the bottom dassail and the top dassail the difference is about 10 times mitigated by the redistributive effect of welfare they then did an asset in the quality between the bottom and the top dassail and that was at 100 times and rising in the very top of the top to 1,000 10,000 times now that was 10 years ago and it's gone up by 7 orders of magnitude and what's essentially happened is that largely speaking income over the last decade hasn't risen in some sense if you do inequality on income you could say it's narrowed slightly because there's been a lot of tax penalties on on high earnings as well as those on benefits of credibility but it's slightly narrowed in terms of income but except the distribution has only got worse they've only concentrated even more and asset prices have widened even more why does that matter because once asset prices run away from income prices then for people who are solely on income they can't access assets you don't earn enough to buy a house the most obvious and since property is the most redistributed asset what we are effectively doing is cutting off the young and cutting off workers from owning any assets particularly in places where people want to live such as the south east and this is compounding and compounding and if you look at our welfare system our welfare system essentially rewards the old against the young most of our pay most of the rise in public expenditure is to do with the triple lock in pensions and the rise in chronic illnesses and expenditure on health and so what we've we've created is a society that's polarising and pulling further apart so that's just part of that that's point one that's the fundamental restructure of capitalism that's profoundly dangerous I sort of argued this would happen about ten years ago and I said we're seeing a return to middle ages for northern surfdom except the surf's had it better in some ways because everyone thinks the middle ages is a terrible time actually in many ways it wasn't if you were a surf you could generate a surplus and sell the surplus and actually a lot of peasants gradually obtain land and property because they're able to generate a surplus what's remarkable about our condition is it's not possible to generate a surplus through your wages so you can't gain an asset so the fundamental ladders of a participatory capitalist economy have gone now so as I said put that on one side let's go to banky what's the fundamental argument that you do in economics 101 if you start a banky that is efficient allocation of capital if you look at the capital that's generated and as you know banks have the sovereign power they can create money and if you look at it globally what's happened with that power is the enormous amount of credit that banks have generated our watering amounts of credit has largely gone into real estate so largely gone into property I remember some of the surveys I was doing a few years ago something like 90% of the money that flowed into Ukraine went into property property is not an efficient allocation of capital it's not a productive gain for capital it's essentially an exclusive asset that bids people out of that asset now why has why has why did money flow into property rather than other things largely because property often greater returns than other things because a Ronte economy always offers greater returns for those who own the asset that's rented out but what we've got and people have written books on this is we've got a growth problem that in the developed world can only be funded by debt and we've got a low wage problem whereby the people who are relatively low wages can't afford anything so you need debt in order to afford anything so what's largely happened is that economies build up debt in order to finance the need to the populations when growth and the benefits of growth are distributed unequally so what we're doing just to produce a round of picture sorry for giving you an account of several moving parts is the banks are progressively generating debt to fund on an equal system where they misallocate capital particularly they're not exclusively to unproductive assets like property but further disenfranchise people that creates more need for debt that requires their banks to create more debt to funnel it you get the picture it's a negative positive feedback so the more values rise what's the name for that? Consistive easing what's the mental output's consistive easing rising in asset costs so that's what we've got so what I think is interesting is looking at Adair Turner's text on this and he wrote about this back in 2016 but I think it's equally valid now and he argues for a removal of the money making power from banks and the restoration of the credit function of banks to a central bank and you talked about in your introduction the need to genuinely break the system and for retail banks to go to what's called the 100% reserve bank so they only lend out the deposits they get in now what is the answer to the problem I've described? what is the answer to the problem I described is productive investment of capital that capital has to flow to those parts of the economy that generate productivity now largely speaking this isn't happening for a variety of reasons number one is we have no way of telling which companies in which regions are productive the government has done three innovation surveys and nobody not even let's respond and that certainly hasn't figured into bank lending so we have dates are out there as to which companies and which areas are at national level of innovation international level of innovation to lending because we don't have the architecture or the infrastructure so what I want to end on I appreciate you is that I like the idea of taking the credit producing functional banks I like giving it to a central bank but I think we need to give this to regional banking structures that are tied in the proper measured levels of innovation that have the granular detail to sort out good from bad businesses and to link those businesses such that they can compete as a whole supply chain rather than singily so you need a genuine kind of banking structure that can knit companies together precisely for the productivity innovation and export gain and lend to that at scale now what this would deliver is something we don't have in this country which is an industrial strategy that directs capital to where it's most efficiently needed to where it can generate the maximal productivity gain and export share and if we redesigned let's call it business banking around that rather than the sorts neurotic model we have at the moment in which wider innovation functions play in their role at all what we will have developed for the first time in the UK is an at scale regional banking system that funds and supports innovation at scale now that it's not the answer to all of the problem but that at least we'd align banking with innovation and productivity at scale that's recommendation one we'll start with that one we've covered a lot of ground from banking as a public utility access to cash the need for banks to be involved with stopping crime change, inequality increasing asset prices and even thinking about the credit function I really want to bring in the audience because I'm appreciated you've all come and walked up a lot of stairs to get here and I'm sure you've got some insight so I'm going to ask you just to turn to somebody ideally you don't know and have a conversation about what you've heard if you want to answer a specific question it's what should the government's priorities be for the UK banking sector and we'll give you two to three minutes and then we're going to take comments and questions from the floor so yeah, thank you and you can get a drink at the same time or something I like it I like it I like it I like it I like it I like it I like it Excellent Excellent I think I'll be able to hear that I'll repeat it, but I can't You can ac mae'n adnod i'r clywed, ac mae'n adnod i'r cyfrwng. Ac mae'n cael ei ddweud ymlaen i gael y cyfrwng? Nid oed yn dweud, fynd i'n ffawr. Yn y dweud, mae'n dweud eich hwn yn gwybod i'r cyfrwng, mae'n dweud eich cyfrwng yn rhoi'r cyfrwng? Yn y dweud, mae'n dweud eich cyfrwng yn dweud. Mae'n dweud eich cyfrwng yn dweud y cyfrwng yn dweud. Mae'n dweud eich cael ei ddweud. Felly mae'r cwestiwn ar y cwrs? Mae'n cael eu bod yn ysgolus. Felly mae'n cael eu cymunedau digital. Mae'n cael eu bod yn ysgolus. Mae'n cael eu cymunedau digital i ddau. Power, power, power... .. ac other power. Wel, mae'n cael eu cymunedau. Mae'n cael ei bod gwrs, wrth gwrs, ac mae'n cael ei bod gydweithio. Welau'r müddwchau gyda ysgolus yn ymddiol... ..au'r gweithio. Mae'n cael eu ddau, fel am moughanh. Can you say quickly, maybe could be foreward it, such that the existing profit fuel numbers don't simply say a little bit more and contributing more profits from arms and work in the system? Who's in charge of making that happen? I'll take one from the supporters' questions they submitted, so Dylan from Hallsades is that our place? Mae arwain rydych chi ar gyfer beth sy'n gyffredinol ar gyfer beth y dyfodol? Be angen, yw'r cyfeir y wych chi'n eu cyfrifio ar gyfer beth y dyfodol? Efwyd yw wedi bod yn cyfrifio ar gyfer beth y dyfodol a hynny a dyfodol ein call. Rydyn ni'n golygu mewn amddangos, o'r gyrddog hollodau yng Nghymru, o'r cyfnodd maen nhw i ddechrau i unrhyw mwy o'r pryd, YArdullwydd yn gafodwch ar y ddadiog yn nghefnol i ddraeth y ddweud來說b, er mwyn ddechrau ar eich cerdd os ydych yn gwych y lle balwyd, raddwch arnaeth o gyllidau ariggynghwyno o'r ddiogel... Roeddwn ni wedi wneud bod yn eich gwaith o meddwl o branc fron i ddiogelu o'r colli, ac roeddwn ni'n ymddangos o'r branc o branc yn ol Ust. Os y bydd y branc o'r colli'r ystafell, ...y arbeiten with a branch when football reduces and the number of people they don't obviously see, and what that does for their own self... ...confidence and value of what they're doing. The height of some really important challenges we as an industry have to address and how we work with our colleagues. W need to find alternative solutions because I think what we can never do is ensure that anyone is left behind by this transition. This needs to be what people choose to do. If you choose to continue using cash, we need to make sure that you can still have the way to manage that cash. But that complicates the process with many different elements to it. So it's everything from where do you go to get it? Is it an ATM? Is it cash back when you go to your local convenience store? Or is it the post office? We now have over 12,000 post office branches where you can go and access cash. You can check your bank balance, you can pay in money. That has an entire extra kind of 50% to the size of the branch network all over again. But also we need to think about how we ensure this is maintained going forward. Because the flow of cash around the UK through, you know, literally the balance driving it around is currently operating at about 50% capacity. It's not viable to keep that going forward unless we can find a solution to make that work in the long term. So one of the things the industry is doing with the support of the Bank of England and with Treasury is to find a way to make a sustainable solution about how we keep flow of cash effective and build a new infrastructure for cash so that people won't be left without that level of access. And I think it's those kind of initiatives. It's thinking a bit differently about how we use branches, whether they're shared branches or whether you can use convenience stores or different central hubs in your community in different ways, that we have to be willing to explore and invest in the sector. Great. Picking up on this gentleman's question around, you know, if I'm going to kind of nuance what you said slightly, but if the big banks were told that they had to lend into like certain regional infrastructure projects, I mean we used to have kind of credit guidance in the 70s where there's a kind of a mutual understanding between the bank fingers and the banks that they had to, they couldn't just lend to kind of preexisting assets of the large market, they had to also lend to more productive sectors, like how do they respond if they were told they had to lend to a certain amount of money? I'd like to actually sum parts of our government, you know, if it is the law on the front of this country, that is something we will abide by. But I think the banking sector, it's really important to remember we talk about lending to SNEs and commercial finance. It's in our interest as an industry to lend to productive businesses, it's in our interest to lend to viable SNEs that will scale up and grow because SNE lending is fundamentally a commercial activity and therefore it doesn't make centipers not to be seeking out that productive growth and I think the information that is available to the industry is huge. You know, we have postcode level lending data to every SNE business lending decision down to your local street which we can analyse and look at as well as the information that comes in through the regional networks that many institutions and banks have. And I think there is a strong desire in the industry to ensure that we do grow by other businesses, that we do work with organisations like the Scale of the Institute to ensure that there is effective lending right across the UK. In fact, if you map SNE lending against productive activity, so whether that's a number of company registrations or the level of corporate activity, actually it maps almost identically. There isn't this sense that we only lend to the south-east and actually if you go up to the north west there's nothing there. Actually the level of lending is very commensurate with the level of economic activity but we do need to keep working with businesses to encourage them to come forward because we haven't yet fully addressed the lack of trust between SNE and the sector. And I think there is a real problem with that. Can I answer that? No, respond to that. So if the level of economic activity is the primary mode, actually your answer is no to the regional banking initiatives that could be recommended aren't going to get the time to challenge. I mean the interesting thing is that's a real humour kind of requirement and the gap that you're talking about is postcode lending data isn't necessarily the right way to judge at scale SNE lending. As we were speaking earlier, depending which reporting rate, it's somewhere between 65% to 75% of bank lending goes to unproductive asset activity and main property but not exclusively there are other forms of asset. So what we have is at most only a third of all bank lending going into productive activity. That isn't really even my point and there's a really interesting question. What the UK industrial strategy needs to do is knit the parts into a hole that you can lend to such that you fund the gaps within that hole. So take for example the UK car industry that pretend Brexit wasn't happening. There wasn't an engine block hybrid electrical car maker in the whole country. The people that made hybrid engine blocks were in Poland, they saw no reason to move here. Now unless you knit together or have a whole sectoral approach, you're never going to create the conditions to fund, to create a fully circular economy within the UK and even more importantly if we keep doing everything on the individual business level we won't convert whole areas to being export led. So all the evidence, I do lots of deep pollution, I do lots of whole area turnaround. The single most successful indicator is exports, that's what really sheds. And a lot of the companies that are at the low export level are at the low export level because they're not lived and they don't even know about the other companies that are export led, that they're not linked to but they can collaborate with. And the missing element and even our leps don't do this because our leps are very mixed bad is we need to knit together a whole supply chain domestically in a place in order to do whole supply chain competition for an area. Now part of that is reflected in the new industrial strategy with sector deals. So you could not oddly have a sectoral bank which makes sense for instance in the nuclear industry where you might want to fund modular reactors or molten salt reactors rather than water pool reactors where we've got potentially for instance an enormous nuclear industry moving from Wales to the north west coupled with area or a place based bank. But unless somebody does the knitting together we won't fill the gap, you are not in a place based bank data quite fragmented, that's the best proxy you've got for SME lending. You know, no wonder we're in a monopolised economy because that is not sufficient for purpose and we lack to at scale both sectoral base based data onto who's ahead and often the companies that are trading ahead don't talk to anyone else around. This is why even in post virtual clusters, clustering still works. Clustering still outperforms as a base based approach to economic development and anything else. Why? Because you get to look alongside and work with good competitors and we have no banking or no infrastructure or no economic institution in Britain that knits that together. And we need to develop that and make that the main thing. So are you going to comment on any of the questions? Well maybe I'll think of the questions on cash, digital cash. I mean cash, it's all virtual. I mean there's nothing special about the coin in your pocket that differentiates it from most money in circulation in 97 or so percent which is in fact electronic money right now. I've just come back from the Netherlands. I think that I, in the three and a half years I was living there, I took cash out maybe three or four times in the whole time but I'm just don't need it at all. In fact coming back here, it does feel like stepping back a decade. My mum still uses checks and goes to the bank and she says you know she's safer and I can't argue with her for it. But she doesn't mind paying the more money rather than getting the discounts on direct debit because that's the lot of what she's been using and that brings us to another question around how are things paid for and we've got suddenly this kind of duality of expecting things to be free banking and wanting banks to be profitable especially the ones which are known by the shareholder executive. And yet we don't want any sort of other sort of funny business on the side. So it does tend to be economic which is a barrier for regional banks. I mean there aren't regional banks or local banks which are starting right now. The difficulty is how are they going to compete and what's the value that we can recognise for those happening? What support do they need to be able to play a meaningful role? Because whilst the large banks are financing SMEs, that's not the full picture because it's still, if you look at it so, we've got a network of values based banks like us around the world. Value based banks tend to finance about double the rate of real economies of real businesses compared to large banks. With large banks because of chasing historically in the business models chasing shareholder return meant a lot of asset based finance which kind of drives more speculation because all of our collective will was being translated via pension funds to them as you need to be able to deliver double digital returns. And that has distracted the business of banking away from the good honest kind of bank which is needed and from the innovation that's going to be required if we're going to be able to meet the challenges going forward. So there's a good question about how do we value these things to be able to restack the economics not just one of the regulatory conditions. Great, thank you. I'll just take off my chair hat for a moment and say positive money is also doing some work on central bank digital currency in terms of digital version of cash in order to move the payment system to normal. So we're looking at how these are a master of some monopoly on the payment system. Great, so let's take another round. So you had your kind of four and a more good to the back and then what's the thing about it? Yeah, and when we jump only to our basic state pension and the state pension is the worst in Europe and certainly the worst in Western Europe and one of the things that's important is the availability of cash. I deal exclusively in cash after both the people, the money from the deposit counting and the post office which the people in the economy earlier this week put and the contract with them is going to advance. So I've got to find a bank account or a union account which I won't divide because I don't trust banks and I've had more of issues with banks over the last 10 years. So I live in it of the difficulty of being bullied basically and I want to work in the pensions and I think that no one should be made to pull the money out of post office. You can't still have a bank account because the post office has bank accounts in the major banks. You can't have the money given and take the bank account case through the post office. Well, I've got to trust the banks and not to do that. I won't trust any of the high street and the banks with any money and I find that we have cash, that they really need cash and also you know what we have quite a part to spending and you know what stocks are, it's gone. Where's online or you know digital and things can be thought of, can be the thoughts in fashion and also I noticed that, has it brought up the triple mark on pensions that is necessary to free and state pensions and ought to allow it and people who just about live on and because I think it's the retail price index something else, something else, I also belong to an organisation called the university pensioners association and we campaign about that on other things as well. So I just wanted to bring that up and you know, it's not very nice when we get to your 60s to confuse about you know, your money doesn't matter, it's in this place of this country, it's the richest in the world and I'm called to pay people properly and I just want the workers to go to food banks. Yeah, thank you so much, that was really well made. Can I just think it was a 65-year-old pet shop and say that it's not going to come out of my mind like maybe I was trying to figure that out, I don't think it's going to work out. I think that that was a both points absolutely fine and we've done, I can build on your point, so positive money have done polling, we know that I think around is it 66% through the higher income. 75% of people don't have to pay through banks, that's just a fact in the UK and yeah, we're so aware of access to cash as being a problem for certain people and depending on your circumstances, so thank you for your point. Let's take the person at the back. Yeah, so great, so it's kind of a question around the role of fiscal versus monetary policy in an industrial strategy again, essentially what you were talking about, but I just add one more question and then we'll come to the audience. So the last question I'll take is from the positive money supporters, Josh from Dundee. So we don't have a Conservative party representative, but maybe you could comment whether we think that the policies have failed in terms of regulating the increasing amount of banking monopolies that we have, or one banking monopoly, and what would the potential benefit be of breaking those up. So, if you want us to take, shall we start with you? I'll take the last two, so I think it's certainly true that the Conservative party has done not no competition and consumer welfare is the standard of competition or it's been true for the last two generations. Is a pro monopoly, a pro market concentration standard. We have intervened in the tax sector, we have stimulated the firm of you on tax, but it's true across the whole economy. So, so I agree with your online question. I think we need a new rigorous approach in the competition that has been holding up for the good 20 years. As to the point about political hurdle with, the size of the UK economy is about 300 billion less than we would have thought if the banking prices have not happened if you extrapolate for over 2,000 a day. So, we're in a much smaller economy than, I don't know anyone who thinks that Brexit won't rapidly depress our economic growth, at least for the short term. So, we've got to really face up to our productivity problems that are related to our innovation problems that are related to where we put money. And I think that our present banking system has a very poor record of investing in place and on a sectoral basis. And therefore, I think that necessity is the mother of invention and we will create those new learning institutions. Because if we don't, we'll carry on as before and that will be ever more dimensional in terms, which essentially will reintroduce the standard. And that would be a very bad thing. Well, I think, you know, Britain is relatively rich so it could be a long 20-year decline before it becomes relatively poor. And people said that about the financial crisis, they did the green innovation and it has least of all the banking sector. So, Warmore could not be optimistic. Warmore would not have done that. As well, I've come out in terms of monopolies because there have been quite a few proposals in terms of breaking up the facts. I'm not a huge fan of that as a policy because in terms of how you actually price something about that artificially and sort of surgically, A, that's quite problematic. It doesn't remove this structural kind of forces in terms of what is it that we've got right now which is forcing and driving back to being as big as they are and as far away from communities or sectors as they are. Until we actually can put a value on getting closer to communities, getting closer to the needs, being able to provide different services which people require who are vulnerable or not, who are underserved, being able to kind of promote innovation in the sectors, until we address those structural factors, we're going to go around in the cycle but not going to be able to get to kind of the level of localism, level of specialism that we require. What we do, though, is a system of smaller or agile banks that are going to be able to invest in things in the future which are close to what the economic priorities and the social environmental priorities that we've got. A competition point. We have to take a different approach to how we build competition in the banking environment going forward. We've seen government initiatives for the last five years so we've celebrated the kind of 25 plus new banking licenses that have finished you but simply creating more organisations that are small-scale in size that can't really challenge and grow in this space, isn't going to bring a genuine competition system. We need to look at why we can't build an environment that enables those firms that can to genuinely grow on needs against being competent to ensure that they can offer a diversity of choice. But I think we also need to start looking forward about where real competition in the banking sector is going to come from because we are changing what it is to do banking. Not just in the UK, but it's not just the deposit that's contained into Council's walls. It's increasingly payment activity and that work has increasingly been provided by firms that are not banks, that are not regulated as banks, they're not viewed as banks, but more importantly by customers. Customers don't think of them as banks, they're not expecting treatment in particular ways and we need to ensure that as we have genuine competition coming from this space we need an environment that enables that competition and encourages that competition but also ensures that customers are protected because if you choose to send money with company A rather than company B you shouldn't have to figure out whether you're protected in the same way. We should have a system that means that you are, but that system shouldn't prevent innovation from happening. I think that's a really difficult challenge that central regulators have coming forward. How do you enable that innovation so that we can have these new very democratising initiatives that are obviously being built, but without customers questioning whether they've still got the same rights? Good point, thank you. I think we, I don't think there's any more questions isn't there from the audience? Okay great, let's have two more quick ones. We've got to finish in five minutes. It's about putting the bank of the million and taking mention of one side of it. I don't see what role the bank of the million has. It's mostly in the short term or managing that money. What is the role of the bank? We can answer that one, and if you want to answer the question of that? Yeah, I think we're ready to do it at the moment more. Let's have short, happy answers to finish. Can we start with you and move on by this way? I think the role of regulators in ensuring we have a banking sector that is safe for all is critical. I think the post-crisis reforms that have been implemented have created a ratio in where we have multiple regulators. So the financial regulatory authority which is part of the Bank of England, financial conduct authority, payment services regulator, the information commissioner are all in addition to the market to market authority, core elements in which are regulating rightly the activity and conduct of our banking institutions. It's key that we keep that under control review going forward to ensure that it meets the needs of the sector as it grows and evolves and changes. I think one of the key areas where that work is critical is impactments. We need to ensure that payments evolve at pace. We get the regulations right, that the regulations read about the right protections and that customers understand what those protections are. I think on your final point about how to really ensure better competition, the points raised in the recent future finance review by Hugh Bansden as I think allowed some interesting conversations to have that, how the Bank has potentially opened up access going forward, and I think we are certainly keen to understand how that can work and what can be dealt with there. No, I think really interesting point about regulation is regulation favours and compensate. I think that's the dominant reason why we haven't really had any outscaled UK banking competition. If you look at the capital adequacy requirements now, about six times higher than they were during the crisis, you know, the struggles of Metro Bank, it's actually an incredibly difficult market to enter. So then we have to ask, well, what do we do? Arguably the developments in tech mean that you can provide for consumers' needs outside of the traditional. And business lending I think has done very poorly by the mainstream banks hence the type of innovation. So that's probably how I would take it, and more of the credit card independent deal much of consumer debt needs, and the mortgage mark for business dominated by, I would say, in the morning. Super briefly, Bank of England has actually been one of the leaders in the space in the global front. We've got to maybe say more about the general state of regulation, but they have. And they have been part of the network between the financial system and people like Mark Carney and others. It's actually started to challenge what is the mandate that they should have as regulators. Because if it is just too narrow, it's focused on individual banks, well along the collective piece, that isn't sufficient and no one is necessarily carrying that mandate. What the financial commerce authority have is a sandbox for innovation in the digital payment space. It would be great if they could extend that sandbox to be able to test and experiment things for other things which are more value-based, some of the stuff in terms of localism, being able to invest directly in more impactful funds. Most individuals in this country are not able to invest in anything other than stock market listed funds. What if there was a sandbox to be able to open up more experimentation? Nothing of links to your point in terms of other things being opened up. I think in terms of Bank of England's reserve of cash, there's probably a deeper question. I've just come from mainland Europe where European central banks are serving cash. They're not available to individuals, but if they were, at minus 55.55%, I'm not entirely sure that they'll be flying off the shelves right now. So I think most important is about being able to think about how to be engaging individuals in terms of what they're going to be able to do so that people can take different risk positions. People are in different situations, so we can't have a one-size-fits-all kind of approach to what is offered, but we do need much more variety and much more genuine opening up to be able to follow things from that to that. Thanks very much. Great point to end on. I think we've covered a hell of a lot of ground in the UK banking fit for purpose. I think we'd all probably say we could do a lot better. We've covered everything from climate change to the quality of banking, to public utility, access to cash, regulation. So I just want to thank our panellists and very much to the audience for coming. I think there's probably a little bit of wine or coffee or food left if you want to hang around for a quick chat. And thanks very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I think it's great. And if you could see the engagement. I was on the media conference. There's no words. How long did it go? OK, right. You went, yeah, actually, yeah. Yes. Great. Yes, yeah. Because I know that I can see that the end is just to see our day again over the last two years. I'm just wondering if we can stop with it. Because we've been working at the LWC far the end. That will be part of this team. Part of the people there. I think it's going to be some other schools in the country. I know it was good. I was there. Secretary-General, it's working. It's starting a series. I think that whole process of engaging stakeholders. I think that's the conversation. That's the conversation. It's just a wonderful thing. I think it's great. Is it boring? Yes. OK. You go on. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.