Victoria Cleland: Payments - a platform for innovation

Speech by Ms Victoria Cleland, Executive Director for Banking, Payments and Innovation of the Bank of England, at SIBOS, London, 24 September 2019.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

It is a great pleasure to be speaking today at the 'UK payments infrastructure - renewing for growth' event at Sibos. This year's event is exciting for two reasons. First, it's National Inclusion week here in the U.K. And, it's a great coincidence that SIBOS has fallen during this week: at the heart of its agenda are discussions around how change and diversification in payments could lead to a more inclusive financial system. Second, this is the first Sibos conference to be held in London - and it is certainly an exciting time for so many global payments experts and innovators to be here.

London has a long history at the heart of the global financial system. It continues to build on this expertise and is one of the leading fintech hubs in the world. It is home to an incredible pool of the world's best and brightest talent, with 44,000 people already working in fintech, more than in Silicon Valley or New York. Investment into the UK's fintech sector continues to grow and reached a record level of $2.9bn in the first half of 2019, which was nearly 85% of the 2018 total. And we can see that the UK fintech sector is maturing, evidenced by the size of increased investments.