 Please note that I'm already recording, so we will start off with the usual disclaimers and hyperledger related announcements. One is we are operating under the anti-trust rules of the Linux foundation of which hyperledger is a part and the anti-trust rules essentially state that we should not be engaging in any anti-trust or trust-busting activities here, I mean, sorry, anti-trust activities here. The details can be found in the next foundation anti-trust rules, which are quite extensive. But basically what we say is that anybody who participates in these abides by those rules. That's the first thing. One is that we also go by the hyperledger code of conduct, which basically says we have to respect each other and consider even people who disagree with us with respect and treat each other kindly. Thanks for joining, and I think without much lag, we are going to have Will present on CBDC since the Bank of England has really extensively researched this topic and has been on the forefront of that work. We expect to hear lots of things that are cutting edge or at least on the top of mind for the central banks and Bank of England is in the forefront of some of these activities, especially the RTGS renewal, so the wholesale CBDC and the retail CBDC and how they relate to each other would be of particular interest to us. And without waiting too long, I think Will should take over and he can share a screen if he has problems, then we will assist him, okay? Thanks. Please add your names to the agenda and notes because that's very important. Thanks again, and Will, please take it away. Okay. Thank you. Hello, everyone. My name is Will Lovell. I've got some slides which I am going to screen share with you right now. So hopefully you can see those. I'm going to speak, I imagine, for about 20 minutes to half an hour, so I'll leave plenty of time for questions as well. So I'll quickly explain who I am. My name is Will Lovell. I have the job title of head of future technology at the Bank of England, which means I'm part of the technology organisation, but I work very, very closely with my colleagues in the policy areas of the bank as well. I spend a lot of my time looking at payments but also at digital currencies. So Dipin and I have known each other for some time, originally through the Hyperledger Trade Finance SIG, and I gave a similar presentation to this in the public sector SIG that I've come here to talk to you, hopefully about the kinds of things you want to hear about. If there's bits I miss or you want to hear more, we'll pick that up as we go or in the questions, I'm sure. So this is what I wanted to talk about today. First of all, I'm just going to talk a bit about the role of the Bank of England within the UK payment system, which is quite similar to most central banks or monetary authorities in different parts of the world. We're all slightly different. We all have slightly different things that we do, but actually in broad terms it's the same, and I'm going to talk about that really to frame the rest of the conversation. We're then going to look at wholesale and retail CBDCs and how they differ, what the, if you like, the concise difference between them is, and that then takes us to a little bit of a look at the infrastructure. I'm not going to go deeply into the infrastructure on this, more to characterize the differences between the two, but also to share some of the thinking, particularly around retail digital currencies that we've been doing in the bank. I'm then going to talk about the role of standards. I think there's a tremendous amount going on in standards generally that we can leverage for CBDCs, but there's probably more work specific to digital currencies and digital currencies on the blockchain that needs to be done, so we can talk a bit about that. And finally, I'm going to talk about the UK RTGS renewal and how that supports digital currency. So that's a bit of an agenda. Let's start off with this. So this is the Bank of England mission statement, which is to promote the good of the people of the United Kingdom through monetary stability and financial stability. So the first thing there, we are a public organization. We are providing services that are very much in support of the UK economy. So everything that I'm about to talk about, but also all of the work that we do really goes in that direction. So we are looking at what the UK economy needs. And this is what I was talking about when I was saying this is generally what the central banks of monetary authorities, how they approach their work. The second part of that is around monetary stability and financial stability. So monetary stability is talking about stable prices, which we approach generally through the setting of interest rates, and financial stability is about having a stable system. So this is about having an economy where people can start businesses, where they can transact through the banking sector, and they know that their money is going to be safe when they put it in a bank. They know that when they make payments or other sorts of transactions, that those transactions are going to succeed. And there's lots of really good research that shows actually, if you don't have that underlying faith that your banking system and your transactions are going to work properly, then it's an enormous drag on economic productivity. It's an enormous drag on the creation of wealth. So this is where it starts to relate to things like payment systems, digital currencies, and modern technology. These things have a great opportunity to be able to create a faster, more reliable financial system that is good for the people transacting it, but actually creates good generally. There's also a risk in there that if we don't get this right, that it starts to threaten the financial stability and prices more generally. So that's really my framing piece. This is how we start. Let's move on a little bit now to look at how we think about wholesale and retail digital currencies in the Bank of England. We've got this quite simple model that was drawn up by a couple of our economists that I find really useful. So we look first of all at obviously a currency, a fiat currency is central bank issued. There's then a question about it being accessible. So if you have centrally bank issued money that is universally accessible, as of today, that is banknotes. So the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, and so on, we issue banknotes that are universally accessible everyone can use. But we're not talking about banknotes today, we're talking about digital currencies. So we need to think about what happens when these things become electronic. Well, we already have universally accessible electronic money and that's bank deposits. So if you make a payment through Visa debit or if you're making a payment by wire transfer, what you're really doing is an electronic transfer of bank deposits and that's universally accessible. You can see that there. And actually we have electronic centrally bank issued money as well, that's typically called reserves. Now you see that that pops outside the circle of universally accessible because typically reserves are only available to commercial banks. So you can start to see, we've got this picture of money that's backed by the central banks issued by the central bank, money that's accessible and money that's electronic. And you can see the big gap that we've put in the center there and that's really where a retail central bank digital currency sits. So it's something that everybody can use, it's universally accessible, but it's issued by the central bank and it's also an electronic medium. So a retail central bank digital currency is actually something quite new, although it has features of things that we've seen before, it's actually something that hasn't existed. Wholesale digital currencies however do exist or something similar to them actually exist already. So if you're making a Fedwire payment or a CHAPS payment in the UK or a Target payment in Euro, something like that, what you're actually doing is moving central bank issued reserves electronically. So a Wholesale central bank digital currency is actually a different form of a thing that's already exists, whereas a retail one is actually something quite new. And I thought that this picture actually shows that difference from a sort of policy and definition perspective. And that difference becomes really, really important when we start to think about how these things are implemented, what the implementation challenges are, and then ultimately the types of technology that need to sit below them. So let's take a look at that now. This is diagram that we use quite a lot and that reflects the current thinking in the Bank of England about retail central bank digital currencies. And it's a layered model. So we'll start at the top and work down, and then maybe actually I'll work back up from the bottom so we can see really how these things fit together. So at the top you can see here we have the central bank core ledger, which is going to have to be very fast, it's going to have to be very secure. So this is the, if you like, the central bank doing the thing that only we can do. This money is issued on our balance sheet, so we need to keep very, very tight control of how that money moves around our balance sheet and what those exposures are. But as a central bank, you know, thinking back to my first slide, we're really a bunch of policy people who are thinking about that monetary stability and operational stability, we're not thinking about user proposition, we're not thinking so much about actually what end users want and arguably neither should we. So what we started to realize was we wanted to provide some sort of access layer that will probably be through a set of quite tightly defined API's that would allow payment interface providers to come in and create products that are based on that ledger that they can then start to offer to users. So that's really how it flows through, if you like, from the central bank through to end users and let's just work back up that stack to think about what that means. So this is very much about the user proposition. How are people going to interact with this thing? Now, in countries like the UK, we already have a fairly comprehensive set of payment services that are available electronically. You know, we have Visa Debit, we have an instant payment solution that we call faster payments that works pretty well. We also have a bulk retail that's used for things like state benefits and payroll and, you know, sort of those kind of bulk use cases. So this has to be something that does a new thing that people want. So that was those kind of services, that very user-focused set of outcomes is where we see the payment interface providers coming in. Companies, be they existing banks, be they existing payment service providers that can come in and create those innovative products. Those payment interface providers would then access the central bank through our API access layer and we would be running that core ledger to make sure that the money transfers accurately, securely and quickly and to make sure that people can have the same level of trust in their central bank digital currency as they currently have in the bank notes that they hold in their hand. So that's really quite a, you know, hopefully you can understand quite a well-defined model that we're currently working on. I was presenting some of this material earlier in the week to some postgraduate students who ask the question, is this the only model? And it may well be that it's not, but this is certainly the central case model that we are working on within the bank at the moment. The wholesale model looks quite different. Sadly, I don't have a diagram to share about this. But thinking back to that earlier slide where I was showing the overlapping circles, a wholesale central bank digital currency is doing something that is at least in theory already possible. So a wholesale central bank digital currency needs to be offering services that are difficult to access through making the more traditional, if you like, wire transfer services. And I've put down a list of things here that I'm just going to talk through that how a wholesale central bank digital currency might differ from the current financial infrastructure that we have. So the first one is access. I mean, this is particularly an issue within the UK that we're working on. But I think it's probably maybe more general. And it's one of this that the costs of accessing a high value payment system like CHAPs in sterling are quite high, and that limits it to larger banks and larger financial institutions and quite often the rule books limit access as well. So there's an interesting question that can a wholesale central bank digital currency kind of make the benefits of central bank money settlement available to a broader group of people. It's a question. There are lots of regulatory and policy things to think about there as well. But if it can just even lower the cost of access that could open the service up to people who theoretically could access central bank money now but actually practically the costs don't make sense. The second point I put was around efficiency. So looking at some of the people who are developing products around wholesale CBDC, a lot of what they're looking for are efficiencies by eliminating things like reconciliation breaks. So the ability to see the exact status of transactions, to see delivery versus payment on a blockchain, to be able to know the exact position of your portfolio and your liquidity. Now, hypothetically, that is possible now, although when you actually look at the number of systems that you have to integrate to and gathering real-time data from them, this is really, really difficult, which is why we end up with what's often referred to as the reconciliation mountain of so many different sets of transactions and pots of liquidity that it's very difficult to keep track on. So a wholesale CBDC issued onto a blockchain can create some efficiencies there. And that takes us to my third point as well, speed. If you're able to track more efficiently, then you should be able to transact more quickly. And the last point there being integration. Being able to, for example, if you have tokens that you're in different currencies that you're able to transact, you're able to actually integrate to do things like foreign exchange settlement, perhaps at a greater speed and greater efficiency. From a central bank perspective, the wholesale CBDC is slightly more straightforward because it looks a little bit more like what we already have. And we've done some brief of concept work in the Bank of England, looking at working with people like Baton, working with people like R3, working with people like, well, Clermatics and the USC that's now called Finality, saying, actually, if we took our current settlement models and exposed them through an API, would they support the kind of wholesale use cases that you have? And in general terms, we found that they can. So really, we've got a contrast there. I think wholesale CBDCs are looking to take a set of services and use new technology to make them more effective. A retail CBDC is really opening up something that is, I would say, is so new what one can consider not being something new that doesn't currently exist. I wanted to talk a little bit about the role of standards. I think there are quite a few standards already that we can leverage. I think there is more work to be done in standards. And then I think we need to look also about where standards move beyond data exchange. So I've put other standards at the bottom, and I'll talk a bit more about what I mean by that when we get there. So first of all, I say 20.02 for transactions. There's tremendous amount of work has gone on and will continue to go on on the ISO 20.02 standards. We are working very hard on that in the bank. We are looking to harmonize payments within the UK, first of all, onto ISO 20.02. So the different sorts of payment systems will use not only the ISO 20.02 standard, but something that we call the UK common credit message as well, so that we can lower costs for people making payments and also increase accuracy. We're also working internationally as part of the HVPS Plus group to start to standardize across the different high-value payment systems, Sterling, Euro, Dollar, Yen, Swiss Franc and so on. So having put all that, expended all that effort into getting that standardization, I think there's something really good there that we can leverage around digital currencies because once you get under the bonnet of ISO 20.02, what you're really doing there is that you're defining the various parameters and parties and sets of information you need within a transaction. And the same will be true of transacting on a currency as it will transacting within a payment system. So there's lots to leverage there and I wouldn't want to throw that away. Where I think there's already quite a lot of progress, but we all need to make more progress, is around digital identity, both around individuals and institutions. I'll talk about institutions first because that's possibly slightly easier and individuals is a more complex picture. So around institutions, again, within the Bank of England we've done a lot of work to promote the legal entity identifier, LEIs, and we will continue to do so and that's going to be part of our long-term ISO 20.02.2 roadmap and we're looking at where it goes beyond that as well. So we can really start to get a very clear idea about which institutions we're transacting with and starting to get a lot better-defined data. I think as we start to look at the more global and internationalised transactions that we start to see with blockchain and digital currency-based solutions, this business of being able to know exactly who you are transacting with will become more important. That's obviously important for individuals as well. Digital ID for individuals has all sorts of cultural dimensions to it, which is a whole separate presentation, but suffice it to say it's thought about very differently in different parts of the world. In some parts of the world the idea of individuals carrying identity cards is very uncontroversial. In other places, the UK being one of those places, it's much more of a controversial idea. There's some really interesting work going on in the Republic of Ireland at the moment around digital identity. The way they have started to think about it is to actually look at how identity of individuals is managed at the moment, which is largely we ask people to turn up in a particular place and perhaps bring some paperwork like a utility bill or a bank statement that has their address on it, which I think we can see we ought to be able to do something better than that. There's a way of thinking about this, that actually we can, rather than start off with perhaps the ideal of some completely heavily encrypted biometric standard, which absolutely definitively identifies you, which certainly as a technologist I find that fascinating, we actually start and work up and say, well, what can we do that's better than the thing we have now? However, we work through this digital identity will become more and more important as we start to digitalize both currencies, but transactions more generally. I think that's going to require standards as well. That brings me to the next point really, which is other data exchange. If you look at the frictions that exist on cross-border payments in particular, a lot of that revolves around anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing checks, and a lot of it repeat checks that have already been made because your jurisdiction requires it, or equally because you don't quite have the information that you need or that the information perhaps that you need has been lost along the chain of transactions. When you start to look at things like I said, 2022, which preserves a lot more data, and when you start to add into that initiative, like digital identity, you can start to see that the quality of data that comes through an international transaction will go up, and we should see those frictions around cross-border starts to come down. I think there is an enormous role for standards. I think there are some great standards out there, so a lot of work has gone on that we must leverage as we start to look at digital currencies, but we should also recognise the gaps that exist. The last thing I added under standards was what I've called other standards. What I'm talking about here really is what I see as being the standardisation questions that we will have to face once we've got through the transaction and identity problems, and that is things like standards for consensus algorithms, for example. There are lots of very interesting different approaches to consensus. Actually understanding the strengths and weaknesses of one consensus mechanism over another is a very involved process that requires a lot of prior knowledge. I think as we start to move towards platforms that are dependent upon consensus methodologies for trust purposes, it will become important to have to know that different consensus methods conform to a certain level or standard. In the same way that I understand what different cryptographic standards are and what the difference between an AES-256 versus SHA-1 and these kinds of things will start to understand more. I'm giving that as an example. I think there are probably other examples out there. I don't think it will necessarily... This is not something that's going to be show-stopping, but I think it's something that's start to become more important as these solutions start to mature and start to appear. Last of all, I wanted to talk about the role of RTGS renewal in the Bank of England. So this is a piece of work we're doing at the moment. So we are replacing the RTGS solution that we currently have. So for those of you less familiar with the UK, RTGS is broadly the same thing as it's the UK equivalent of Fentwire or it's the UK equivalent of BodgerNet if you're familiar with Japan or Target if you're familiar with the euro. But the solution we have at the moment went live in 1996 and it works fine. But when we started looking forward to these sort of future challenges, not actually specifically looking forward to Central Bank digital currency, but looking forward to the challenges of a more digitalised, more globalised economy, we realised we needed a new platform. So we are in the process of building that. And these are the five areas that underpin our vision. So the first is increased resilience. We have a good level of resilience at the moment, but we recognise that things like cyber threats will continue to evolve. We don't expect to conquer that. That's something we expect to work on continually. At the same time, things like availability become much, much more important and the sort of traditional old school risks of fires and floods haven't gone away. So we need to be resilient to those too. The next point I touched on earlier on, which is greater access. So we want to increase the access. We want it to make it more practical and more cost effective for people to be able to access settlement in Central Bank money. So this links back to what I was talking about at the beginning about our mission for financial stability. But it also links into things like the provision of a whole digital currency potentially. That is one way that we might be able to increase access. And it's something that we're looking at. The next point moving round the circle is wider interoperability. So this is something that recognises that we will need to interoperate with a wider range of platforms, possibly to support different models of delivery versus payment. Again, moving into the sort of tokenisation and blockchain as well as more traditional architectures. But this is also a place where potentially we can plug digital currency platforms in so that we can link that into the legacy banking system, the current banking system, the current way of operating. And it's early days yet, but we're looking at how that might work. Improved user functionality I think speaks for itself, but we are looking at the opportunity just to make things work more efficiently, more effectively, but also give ourselves the capacity to have longer operating hours. And then last of all, strengthening our end-to-end risk management. So this is really about as we make that change, understanding the new risks that we bring in. So there are lots of opportunities in here, but those will bring new risks and making sure that we've got the risk management framework and the risk management information to be able to manage that effectively. And this really brings in, I think, shows you that this is about a policy change as much as it is about a technical change and an operational change. So those were all the topics and areas that I wanted to cover. I think we've got a reasonable amount of time for questions. I'm quite happy to take questions either in the chat box or just to call them out. It's over to you. Yeah, indeed. Don't be shy. Ask questions, please. I have a number of questions, but I would wait to see if they're being asked before joining in the end to hopefully have some time or I will ask them on email. Anyway, go ahead. Please engage with Will. Yeah, hi Will. Kamlesh here. Kamlesh, please go ahead. Yeah, so what is the roadmap when it will be available or just the plan or just the vision or what? So from a digital currency perspective, it's very much at the vision stage. There's a tremendous amount of work for us to do and it's as much for us about understanding that user proposition part as it is about developing technology. A lot of the work that we've done and we did a discussion paper recently, a lot of the work we've done is really about understanding how it looks from a policy perspective and we did a discussion paper. We've had a lot of feedback on that. We're now looking at how we take that to the next step to articulate a blueprint and a vision and delivery. I don't know what the time scale for that is, but I think some of it will depend upon external factors, what happens in the global picture, how other currencies get on with their digitalization. I think if we're one country or currency to race ahead, I think you would see a lot of people fast following. There are also things like even the impact that COVID-19 lockdowns have had on the use of physical cash. We've seen a big decline in the use of cash here in the UK, which I believe has been seen internationally as well. All of these things start to come together to influence the timetable, but we don't have a target date just yet. Yeah, thank you. We heard many news like about digital dollar project from Accenture in the US, and then China, CBDC, they are also doing something. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, China is forging ahead. I think their pilot project in most countries would be bigger than the entire system that you would need. Their pilot to me looks... What am I trying to say? When you look at how it works, it's like halfway between an instant payment system and a digital currency. It's quite interesting. I think it'll be interesting to see where they go next, but the other thing that's worth reading is they've published a list of the patents that they've applied for, and it's very broad. I don't know whether they're necessarily actually going to develop all those technologies that they've registered patent applications for, but it shows just how seriously they're taking it. There's a question in the chat box about third-party rule changes. I'm not sure. I don't know if I quite understand the question, if somebody can jump on. Yeah, Jim mentioned the question, and it really is back to your diagram, showing CBDC flow you had in the bank at the top, and then at the bottom you had the consumers in a sense. Accessing bank assets or CBDC through these third parties, and my question around that, right, that layer three there, so in layer three at the bottom, where we have the payment interface providers, are there specific rule changes that are needed for those payment interface providers different than the current systems at all? Or are they just the current rules and regulations in place? Will work as is, I guess, for your CBDC concept? I think almost definitely we will need to have several changes. If you think about a scenario where, let's think of a good example, so if you were to think about a scenario where your payment interface provider went out of business, so your money is safe because it's on the ledger at the top of the picture. However, if you can't get to it through your phone, then you need to access your money, and you need to access your money quickly. So I just sort of finished that. So that's not dissimilar from the resolution regime for if your bank goes bust, but it is actually different. So we would need, that's just an example of a set of rules. We would need a set of rules, first of all, to make sure that payment interface providers actually go and bust is a rare thing. But second of all, actually to make sure that if it happens, then your money is protected first of all most and secondly you can access it quickly. So it's those kinds of things and there's a lot of work to do in that space, but that's the kind of rule change we will need to see. So then I'll say the CBDC model offers, if I compare it, if we had that same service, if you will, CBDC in the US, the way you've constructed it, there would be a significant difference in risk for customers, because currently we have that DIC in the US to ensure our accounts up to a certain limit. But with the model you're proposing, there really isn't going to be a limit. All of your, in a sense, currency that is CBDC would be secured. Yeah, and that's a big difference for what it's worth. Yeah, and what you've hit on there is actually one of the financial stability risks, which is if there's concern over the stability of commercial banks, what is to stop effectively a virtual run on a bank? People going and flipping all of their commercial bank deposits into a CBDC where it's safe and it's protected. Now, there are solutions to that problem, but it's something that's under, you know, it's actually one of the big problems to be solved about the launch of a CBDC. So yeah, I was speaking to some Bitcoin developers recently and they were just kind of going, oh, it's so easy for you guys because you can just make a set of rules and everyone has to follow it. And it was like, yeah, that part of it's easy, but we've got a few problems to solve that you guys don't have. So yeah, it's an interesting space. Yeah. Can we have somebody? Jim, do you have a follow? No, no, I'm done. Thanks. That was awesome. I appreciate it. All right. Looks like Paulo is asking a question where he wants to see whether there's a, let him ask the question. Thank you, Vipin. And thank you, William, for your time and insights regarding this very interesting topic. My question is in regards to, while you have wholesale payments and retail payments currently, and there's this whole discussion about wholesale CBDCs and retail CBDCs, who's going to implement each of those, what is your take in terms of interdependencies between these two types of approaches and timeline? Is there any relationship precedence between wholesale and retail? What are your thoughts on that? Okay, so I'll take it in reverse order. I think timeline is going to be probably demand led. So I think if there's strong demand, that helps with the timeline. I also think that some of the policy questions around the wholesale space are probably a little bit easier to resolve. So if there's a good case to do wholesale quickly, it's probably a bit easier to do quickly. But it might not happen first because there might not be the demand if you see what I mean. In terms of the interdependencies, it's theoretically possible to have one solution that meets all of them. I think practically it will look very, very different. The difference between wholesale and retail obviously is with wholesale, you're dealing with regulated institutions. And there's a couple of advantages to that. One is obviously you have a regulatory framework there that you can modify and you can change. And regulated institutions, they might not like being regulated, but they expect to be regulated. Whereas regulating the general public about how they use their money is a whole different conversation. The second thing is a more prosaic advantage, which is that from the perspective of someone like the Bank of England, we already have relationships with those regulated institutions. So when you start to look at a platform like the utility settlement coin or something like that, you're already dealing with people that we have a relationship with. And it just makes that conversation a little bit more straightforward. I hope that answers your question. So as a follow-up question, is it fair to say that although wholesale CBDCs are not demand-led by the end user, they might occur in first hand by one of two options, whether because it's easier to implement or because there is essentially a reaction move that needs to be taken according to other wholesale CBDCs around the world? Yeah, quite possibly. I think there are some market forces in here is what I think I'm saying. Okay, thank you. Lots of questions coming up on the chat, but we can probably sort of group them in a couple of areas. One is, of course, the whole Bitcoin thing. The second is the, which I would defer at this point. The second thing is about the standards like, for example, Eugenio is asking whether global business standards like ISO 2022 and interaction with technical activities like ISO TC307, how does that affect? But my question would ask a follow-up to that would be why are you guys focused on ISO 2022? I know that a lot of work has gone into it, but it seemed more like a union of different standards that exist already. That's the first comment. Second is it does not have the modern cryptographic underpinnings inside it. I mean, the messages stand alone and in fact it's shown that those standalone messages have a way to be tampered with, especially if you can interfere in the middle. So the ISO 2022 standard seems peculiarly unsuited for the modern age in that sense. The second part of my question, which also comes along there is whether you heard about the ITU work that has just started under the DCGI, which is Digital Currency Global Initiative. They seem to be focused a lot more on technical standards and some other questions that you raised about consensus algorithms and so on, they are going to be addressed in that DCGI setting. I believe you guys should participate in that because it's very interesting and important. Anyway, go ahead, the technical versus ISO 2022 timeliness. So yeah, I think the technical standards is something that we will engage with in due course. I think it's not the top of our list at the moment. ISO 2022, yeah, so I think there are ways to secure it that prevent the tampering. I think there's a couple of things about it. One is it's a standard that has achieved the level of adoption and it's definitely in motion. That's the first thing and I think, like I said, I don't think we shouldn't lose the work that's gone into that when we can leverage it. What's the second thing I was going to say about it? Yeah, I think the fundamentals of transactions allows you to integrate into the existing financial infrastructure as well because none of these currencies are going to be able to just exist on their own. One of the interesting challenges around all of it is how do you get there? We can launch a digital currency but actually the adoption curve of it, if you look at the adoption curves of any kind of payment products, it's never linear. It's always very slow at the start and then you tend to overestimate adoption in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. What's a good example? Fast payments, the instant payment solution in the UK saw very, very little use in its first year. A few hundreds of thousands of transactions. It's now a busy day, eight million, which nobody ever saw when it went in. I think CBDC will likely be the same, that it will start quite quietly and then when people find the use case for it, find that the convenient thing that it gives them will start to adopt it very, very rapidly as has happened as well with contactless technology. While we're in that period of getting from the current world into the new world, we'll need to be able to interoperate. The second thing that came up was from Junji Kato from Itaubank, Brazil. He says, how is the CBDC initiative accelerated by open banking that is placed in Europe? On the other hand, how GDPR may add complexity to privacy on the CBDC? I think it works in parallel to open banking. I mean, I think the purpose of open banking was and is to actually open up the market a little bit. We have a situation certainly in Europe. I'm not close to what it is globally, but certainly in Europe and definitely in the UK where commercial banks, retail banks own the entire stack. They are managing the ledger and the accounts and the balance sheet. They're creating the products. They're marketing the products and then they control the access to those products through apps or online portals, whatever they might be. That makes it very difficult for people to purchase different products, maybe mortgages and savings and retail current accounts from different providers. Open banking was really tackling that about saying actually it should be easier for consumers to be able to get their financial products from different providers rather than getting tied in by people owning the entire stack. I think a central bank digital currency can complement that in that it's just another thing that makes it easier for people to access different types of products and move their money between those products. Notwithstanding the problem that Jim raised earlier about people just holding all of their money in the CVDC, actually that pushes the banks a little bit harder to think about what their product offerings might be. I think that's how it sits with open banking. GDPR, I view as being quite helpful actually because I think that we will need to, as I was speaking about digital identity earlier, we will need to face into the data and information problems that a central bank digital currency creates. Whether we like it or not, whether you think surveillance is a great thing or whether you think surveillance is a terrible thing, wherever you are on that spectrum, a ledger that shows how everybody is spending their money is a source of enormous information. So actually having a framework about what you can do and what you can't do with that information is actually a very important thing. I think trying to perhaps develop that framework while you're trying to develop the currency just makes it even harder. That makes sense. Yeah indeed, I think today they are all been called in the US all the big tech companies have been called to the Congress to testify and to justify the way they have been gathering information on everybody and sort of misusing that stuff. And only legal protection by GDPR or very strong laws that have some teeth will stop this practice because otherwise they do run rampant. The other question that came up was the CBD discussion paper. There was a debate on whether you should use DLT or traditional centralized model. Is there a direction that you guys favor or is it still open question? We are deliberately open about that. And the reason is really about saying we need to understand what technical capabilities are required and then we'll select the best technology to deliver them. Internally I would say there's a spectrum of opinion. There are some real distributed ledger skeptics. There are some absolutely advocates and people like myself who sit somewhere in between the two. But I think we made that point because we wanted to say look we really need to understand what the proposition is, how we're going to deliver that proposition through our layered model I've got on the screen at the moment. Then we can understand what the ledger is rather than start off from right distributed ledger. It's going to be in blockchain now. How should we do it? Yeah, sounds good because you know based on conversations there seem to be a lot of skeptics on either side. I think we have come to the end of our hour and it's been a fascinating discussion. Unfortunately we haven't gotten through a lot of the questions but that's been you know your presentation is beautiful in many ways because it covers this ground in the course of about 20 to 40 minutes and it gives a what we call you know a view from a sort of a privileged position which is one of the more forward looking banks. So I hope to continue some of these discussions which we always end up talking about but never seem to actually follow through because there's so much happening. One of the things I would like to do is to have this slide deck if your institution allows it to be available from our site and of course the video will be posted up there so that's the other so maybe we you know we need to sort of talk about this every quarter every half year or something because it's a moving target and we are deeply engrossed in it ourselves in the sense of the capital market sig and we will soon have somebody talking about you know the nitty gritty of you know using MPC or something to move it to control the movement of large amounts of money so we do have that technical bent here sometimes but we also have we try to be open like having people like you or participate even though you're you're had a future technology you're also seem to be plugged into the policy side of the equation. So again thanks and we hope to continue this and we hope to give you some of our you know our first efforts at writing something more comprehensive but from a more commercial viewpoint. That'd be great. Thank you. Thank you and thanks to everyone. Thank you. Yeah thank you Nick and thank you Will. Thank you. We'll have the you know everything on on the site and I'm going to turn turn off the meeting so everybody will get knocked off. Sorry. See you later. Bye.