Tao Zhang, deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, discusses the digital revolution represented by the digitization of money. Its impact holds a nearly unimaginable combination of technological benefits—and potential dislocations.
Transcript
Marie Gooding: We're fortunate to welcome an outstanding keynote speaker this morning. Tao Zhang is the deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund at the IMF. He's an expert in international economics and policy making. I'm going to leave the bio to you to read in your program, but I want to share with you that in a recent interview with CNBC, he noted three main challenges for the global economy: tensions on the trade front, fiscal and financial risk, as well as the ongoing struggle to achieve inclusive growth, much related to our conversation last night. Speaking on innovation, he said financial technology has great potential to bring efficiency gains and wider coverage of financial services for everyone, but we have to pay very close attention to cybercrime, he said, with the IMF working together with countries and concerned industries to find solutions to the problem. He will offer this morning unique perspectives and sharing his insight on the digitization of money and finance. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Tao Zhang to the podium.
Tao Zhang: Thank you for the kind introductions, and good morning everyone. First of all, of course; I would like to express my appreciations to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta for the invitation to speak here today on issues facing central banks and regulatory authorities in the era of technological advances in the field of the finance. I have to say that I'm not sure I can beat the beautiful weather in such a nice setting, such early mornings to talk about this subject. I know the subject is fascinating itself, but I'm not sure I can offer anything better than what you have discussed yesterday and of course in such an early morning.
So let me start with the global economy. A moment ago Marie mentioned I had an interview with CNBC talking about the challenges we are facing. That's all about we're talking about finances because the economy is the finances which we try to serve and also of course the finance is part of the economy as well. As you can see, the world economy is experiencing a nonstop digital revolution. I know that “digital revolution” means different things to each of you, but what in my mind in this moment the digital revolution means that we have a global data sphere. What does that mean? It means by 2025 the global data sphere will grow to 160 trillion gigabytes from just 16.1 trillion gigabytes in 2016.
So that was the tenfold increase in terms of the data held everywhere in the world that—Including all the data in your personal data devices such as the phones and also those stored in the sky, the cloud. Actually, it's not in the sky right? It's on the ground, but we call it cloud. So this represents almost an unimaginable combination of technological benefits and, potentially, dislocations as well. So pretty much opportunities and risk, benefit, and dislocations. So the rest of it is up to you how to balance it. So we have virtually infinite information at our fingertips. Probably too much information. Each and every morning, you wake yourself up by this information.
I believe many of us had the experience that the first thing you wake up in the morning, you try to reach your phone, right? And I'm not sure that's a good habit or not, but that's one where people do that, particularly younger generations. And we are facing the possibilities that our jobs, or some of our jobs, will be obsolete before we retire. So that's something we have to face. Of course, the macroeconomic implications are that all we—the central bankers and the regulators—are worried about or care about in this digital revolution era.
For example, it may alter the path that the low-income countries have followed over the past half century. Our latest world economic outlook contains…a study suggests that automations may replace a lot of labor intensive, manufacturing jobs that these countries used to climb the development ladders. And what does it mean? It means that in these countries, jobs may migrate to service sectors. And again, of course, people may ask what happened to service sectors? Is the machine going to replace the job even in the service sectors, including the financial service sectors? I'll leave the answer to you, but with all of these questions in mind, in my remarks today I pretty much want to focus on the one frontier of the technology that is certain to have a major impact in our economies, which is the digitalization of money and finance.
So basically, three points. First, what happened to digital finance? And second, what about the crypto asset? And three, what is the regulators’ response? Of course, finally at the end of it, I will highlight what the fund, IMF is supposed to do for its 189 membership countries. So first is the digital finance, or the implications to finance or the financial industries, whatever name it is. Of course, what I mean by digital finance is the digitalization of finance spurred by technological advances. And some of them called it innovations. And there is a debate whether or not if you apply to mobile phone, then that's called innovation. But whatever it is, that's technological advances.
And pretty much coined by the term fintech. And of course, you can argue there is tech things, all these kind of things. What I meant is the fintech is a collection of technologies whose applications have impact on financial services. And of course, this includes artificial intelligence, big data, bio metrics, and of course the distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain. And some of the topics we will cover here—the machine learning and so forth or deep learning, whatever you call it—it all belongs to this area. So in general, these digital finance or the digitalization of finance or fintech, whatever name you call it, offers the promise of faster, cheaper, and more transparent and user friendly financial services.
Of course, they raise the prospect of expanding the financial inclusions, especially in low-income and developing countries. And of course, if you look at that, the possibility is so exciting. If you think about the majority of the Chinese populations, 1.4, 1.5 billion people all covered by the cellphones and they have easy access. I think they already realize all the trunk lines, the wifi already covers each and every village in those countries. And you think about countries like Kenya, the mobile phone users already exceed those people who had a bank account. And you can see even in India, Bangladesh, these countries, even in the rural areas, they use the mobile devices to make transactions. That's quite the phenomena, including financial transactions. So the financial inclusion definitely opened the entire—eye-opening advances.
So companies working with artificial intelligence are exploring also the credit scoring based on the payment data, and you see many of the companies doing that. In China, of course, what they call the Sesame scoring system tries to link to financial services, so credit to even airport VIP services, so all these things. And fintech startups in Latin America, Africa, Asia are moving toward the use of peer-to-peer lending data information from mobile phone payment to build a reliable credit database, so all these things are happening at a rapid pace. Of course, I have to mention the things we are talking about, these machineries. There is a new development called the smart contract. You've probably heard of that. This smart contract will allow more secure and faster settlement of financial market transactions. And of course, one of the key features is the automatic triggers that allow transactions to be executed without human interventions. So later on, I mean we will be talking about services—now we are talking about self-services. You service yourself. So back to our early remarks, what happened to the financial services, the jobs replacement? So if you're talking about SME, the small and medium size enterprises, which is the issue of the access to financing and the investment opportunities, obviously the cost and barriers are lowered. A moment ago, we talked about the financial inclusions for household. And of course there are many other programs in Africa.
So to give you an example the Sierra Leone, there's the fintech challenge, which is a program called the Fintech Challenge. And the central bank of Sierra Leone and the United Nations are encouraging the local and regional efforts to develop fintech-based apps to facilitate credit to farmers in remote areas. So these are again, financial access. Now what about the risks? Obviously the risk, that's what we at the fund and I believe all of you; on top of your mind. First of all, of course, the financial stability risks. And we of course—the guardians of the financial sector's stabilities—first of all we have to think what happened to the existing providers, service providers, and business models.
Obviously there is disruptions to the business models for those already in the field to provide services. You have to change. And of course, some of the sectors are unregulated and are facing operational risk. And of course, the issues like, talk about the level playing field and arbitrage and so forth. And even more of course on the securities side, you have cyber securities and all these frauds and so forth. So of course you all know very much the 2016 cyberattack on the central bank of Bangladesh. The hackers gained access to the bank's Swift Code and transferred millions of dollars from the account in—sorry to say—the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in a second.
And of course, the risk also happened too, where you have new forms of intermediations and then there is an issue of the balance of transparencies and privacy. The famous example is the Facebook Cambridge Analytica, and you all heard about that in TV and media. So clearly, there's issues of privacy and data ownership and a whole bunch of the asset concerns. And I heard yesterday the dinner speakers also talk about all of that. So the governance issues are pumped up. I don't think we have solutions to that. And also the different countries may have different practices and coming from the different cultural background starting point. So the purpose, all these kinds of things make it even harder to have these international coordinations.
So that's pretty much the fintech I can sort of highlight at this point. Let me talk about a little bit about the crypto asset. The crypto assets actually in my opinion is the application of all of these technologies. Try to create the virtual forms of a new type of the portfolio options. And it of course, it happened in just recent years. But it came out at a tremendously rapid speed. Our recent GFSR, the Global Financial Stability Report, had an estimate on that. At this moment, the market capitalizations of the crypto asset is about $600 billion just by the end of last year, so 2017. But if you compare just to one year ago, it is only $25 billion. So it's a tremendously rapid increase. Let alone there is even probably bigger size, larger size, of the transactions outside of the exchanges, which is where you have the data.
So what is the general view on this? Our view is the crypto asset provides both, again, opportunities and risk associated with this crypto asset. And the crypto assets have not seemed correlated with other assets so far. So in that sense, it provides alternative options or diversification options for investors and in that sense is good. However, as we said, some of the most recent developments of the crypto assets have tried to link to the fund, the investment fund, so if you have stronger linkages to the existing market, then that's where you probably have to worry about it a little bit more. And of course, one of the main applications for the crypto asset—including some of the crypto tokens—was utilized to promote the cross border of payment. So indeed the speed, the outreach, was much more improved with this new product. And you see small firms are doing that or big firms—both small firms and big firms—are doing that everywhere. Some of the firms like BitPass in Africa, BitOasis in the Middle East, and big firms like Western Unions and Moneygram, they are doing that.
So that's the main applications—what we've seen will bring the benefits. However, because of that, we also have the potential for criminal activities. It can mask identities and will make them attractive for money laundering and terrorist financing, tax evasion and other fraud. So you name it. And an example is last year's enforcement operations against the Alpha Bay, the criminal marketplace. This is many of the reports cited the examples of the crypto underworld.
And back to the legitimate market, of course last year you see the skyrocketing prices of the crypto asset, up and down. And of course they make you compelled, you think about is it a bubble or what? And many of the analysts already compared the price of bitcoin in 2017 was roughly analogous to the South Sea bubbles of the 18th century. So maybe that's a bad image, but clearly the price is up and down and creates not only huge uncertainties, but makes the applications...people try to use that as a means of exchanges and make the prospects look less positive.
Of course in this moment, crypto asset is still relatively small compared with the conventional asset classes. So at this moment, they don't pose a threat to macro financial stabilities, but as you can see, things are evolving so rapidly. So any moment, this can change. So when asset price goes up quickly and risk can also at the same time accumulate quickly, especially if market participants borrow to buy. So when the leverage rises because of crypto asset, vulnerabilities may emerge. The growth of crypto asset-related investment funds and futures contracts, that's one of the examples where I just mentioned earlier could be the areas when the risk accumulated by the crypto asset itself can be transmitted to the conventional market, or if you want to call it the mainstream investors.
So obviously, it creates new areas for the central bankers or regulators to research on it. Whether or not that's an impact in terms of the transmission of the monetary policy signals or transmitted shocks—or in what way? And can you separate the two?—all of these things are I think the areas worth paying closer attention. And because of the things just come in, and I don't think the literature gives a firm answer at this moment. And of course, the expansion of the investor's base and because of the nature of the technologies; some of the transparencies is not being enhanced but rather lost in the crypto market. And if this combined with the rapid growth, then it will produce the market disruptions even more.
And on top of it, and we know that this is a virtual world. There's no national borders, and the borderless nature of the underlying transactions challenges the national authorities of the regulations. So that makes the response from the regulatory side even more difficult. Now with that, let me come to the how and what the regulatory authorities are responding at this moment.
So, how the regulators and central bank should respond—and of course it's easy to think about rule number one, I try to maximize my benefits of the new technologies, of course including the new financial product, including the crypto asset. And of course on the other hand, you're facing so much uncertainties and challenges, risk. You want to strike a balance. But of course to say it, it quite sounds like a lot easier said than done. And where is the balance? And what is the dimension of the balances? So on one hand, you don't want yourself to carry the burdens to discourage innovations, and you want on the other hand to be supportive, to provide spaces for innovations.
At the same time, how would you try to support innovations by the same time maintain the robust regulatory framework? And so people in these areas—this is not my summary but to try to draw the lessons—I just draw them down, some of the points here, highlighting what people are trying to achieve. First, of course, the regulators need to complement their focus on entities with increasing attention to activities. So in a sense, this is not new, actually. When people talk about a focus on the institutions, people are saying, "Okay, because investors are the basis in expending, you have to care about not only who they are, but what they are doing." So not only entities, but also activities.
And of course, like I said, this is the response to the increasingly diversified firms and players in the market because of the new product. Like I said, not only because of digitization, but actually accelerated by digitization. And second, of course, we're talking about governance. Governance—there's broader areas of the meaning of governance. Here when I said “hence the governance,” it means rules and standards need to be developed. It's quite urgent. I know it's difficult, but you need to develop the rules and standards to ensure the integrity of data and algorithm and platforms. So those three things need to be set up with standards and rules.
In another word, we have to insure that all of these service providers on data and platforms operate in a manner that does not expose customers or the financial systems to undue risks. And third, of course, you have to give a little bit of a new think on policy options, including licensing policies. Try to promote or support open networks in a sense that at the same time maintain a level playing field. I give you examples—the regulators can think about how to encourage banks to adopt open application programming interfaces to allow more services provided by new comers such as e-commerce or even social platforms, to encourage the competition.
Of course, people may argue the newcomers—what kind of regulations are going to subject versus the incumbents, the status quo. Whether or not they will be given the level playing field when the bankers open up the so called APIs. But nonetheless, by introducing newcomers, that will certainly create a larger space for competition. And another point is the legal—from the legal principles, we have to say that the legal principles have to be more modernized because maintaining trust in financial services requires the development of new legal frameworks to clarify the rights and obligations of the new financial landscape. I think, for example, the data ownerships and the transparencies, to what extent the data should be disclosed. And who's right?
Like I mentioned earlier, nowadays there is a wider range of the practices. So regulators around the world have begun to address these challenges with a variety of approaches across countries. And I can just highlight some of the examples. These may vary country to country, but there are some points here. First of all, some of the authorities tried to clarify the applicabilities of existing legislations to crypto asset. So basically the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission], here in this country, is trying to explain how the existing rules apply to the crypto asset, or some other authorities are issuing warnings to consumers, like those did it in Korea and Japan. And they are also imposing the licensing requirement on a certain market participant. This is more widely used in many other countries.
And some authorities prohibit the financial institutions from dealing with crypto assets. You'll see it in China. And of course, some of the authorities are completely banning the use of crypto assets, so this is pretty much to the extreme. So all in all, we have to say all these responses at very early stages. We are still in the stage of infancy. We have to see, pay close attention. So what is the impact of these regulations on the market? And different countries, different cities trying to create a different environment for these things. Not only the…try to avoid exposing themselves into the risk, but at the same time they want to take the leap in this field. Everything is so dynamic. And on one hand, they want to create a controlled environment. Have a new try, have a test. On the other hand, whether or not the so-called controlled environment can really be controlled. So nevertheless, you see different efforts achieving trying to become a hub or using sandbox, all these kinds of approaches in a different way.
I have to say that these are very difficult tasks because not only these things are new, also because they cut across the responsibilities of the national borders. And all of these operations operate at a regional or, in most of the cases, a global scale. So we need as central bankers or regulators, in dealing with all of these challenges, one has to be open minded and also at the same time you have to be nimble. And your approach and measures have to be innovative as well. And possibly among the regulators, we have to strengthen our operations. There's no way out. You cannot act alone.
So that brings me to what the Fund is supposed to do. Why we care. And obviously, we are a multilateral financial institution with a mandate to safe guard the financial stabilities. And of course, we have near-universal memberships—we have 189 member countries. So we consider ourselves ideally positioned as a platform to allow different ideas to interact with each other. And to allow different approaches to be compared, draw lessons, best practices so that others can learn from each other. And let me share with you what we are doing at this moment in these fintech areas.
First of all, of course, we try to close the data gaps that are inhibiting the effective monitoring of the potential risks. I know this sounds very easy to say, but it's a huge task, data gaps. We probably have to finish this work in a powerful way, because in traditional data you still have a gap. You may remember, not a long time ago the G20 has a data initiative. We're all talking about data gaps. Still, the data gap is unfinished over there. Now with the new data gaps, and what kind of gap are we talking about? Already people are talking about we have too much data, and what you need is the clean data or data which can be useful for machines.
So the data gap itself is a huge task. And second, of course, we want to provide our membership countries with the systematic risk assessment and timely policy responses. Already, some of our member countries request our advice, whether or not they can issue the virtual currencies, whether or not it's a good idea to move to e-citizens in some other countries. These are not imaginations, it's already happening. We ourselves also meet the challenges without any of the previous experiences and problems already approaching. And of course, we encourage the member countries to protect their consumers and investor's interest and of course, the market integrity.
So these are the common ground for our work. And of course back to the market, we also try to promote transparencies while at the same time respect the protections of the privacy of each individual member country. Now, what is the pressure the central bank particularly is facing at this moment? I have to say something—the challenges raised to the central bank when they conduct monetary policies. Of course, on one hand they want to improve the convenience and the efficiencies and the stabilities of the payment, the settlement system, so that they can safeguard the smooth transmission of the monetary policies. But at the same time, facing the new private sectors, what they call the crypto currencies, but indeed some would call it just crypto tokens, or whatever you call it. We try to develop these decentralized, the new crypto currencies—there is an argument to replace the central bank money.
Some of the central banks already responded by trying to develop their own central bank digital currencies. And of course, the approaches varied by different central banks. And there is no universally agreed definitions of what is a central bank digital currency. But nonetheless, the central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, is already there. And people try to make their money, the central bank money, more attractive, not to be disturbed by whatever the private sector's money comes out, try not to lose ground in the crypto areas. And we are of the view that if designed properly, the central bank digital currency can make central bank money more attractive, and, of course, can broaden the choices for monetary policies while maintaining the support of the stabilities of the financial systems.
And of course one example is—I don't mention who they are—but a group of central banks is actively experimenting with the use of the central bank digital currencies to make a cross-border payment more efficient. Some of them even had a joint project, have a peer-to-peer national currencies, of course in digital forms, tried to make the payment across border in the face of restoring of the correspondent bank relationships, solve the problems particularly in those small island economies. So these are very much useful for some of the pressing need by some of the countries facing the derisking risks.
So I just, in the last couple minutes, I just covered some of the areas—fintech and crypto asset, and central bank moneys—so the idea is now to try to give a verdict. This is good or ostensibly good, or raise a lot of the hopes or highlight a dark picture, have a lot of risk—you shouldn't go on. It's just basically I think the idea is try to alert everybody here, and central banks and regulators around the world cannot sit still. You have to move up, and you have to respond. And try to make your response actually a profit to the questions, to the issues you are facing. And there is no way—there is no way out.
Of course, during the process we have tried to achieve efficient and stable payment and try to also have more effective and larger policies. But at the same time of course, the disruptions, dislocation, something you could be meeting any point, any time. So just be alert, you probably have to. Do you have more days, nights of sound sleep? But that's sort of the new life. So in other words, we have to adopt the right policy responses, something good. And good for not only safeguarding the financial sectors, but also try to embrace the new waves of the technological advances. And so I think by nature they are unstoppable. So the only hope we can have is, we can take advantage of this new technology, we can leverage the new technologies to provide better services or help the financial sectors to provide better services at the same time, so do our jobs to maintain the stabilities and make the monetary policies more effective. So with that, let me stop here and hope we can all share the same views and move forward. Thank you very much.
Paula Tkac: Okay. Well there's some really great questions on here. We're going to start at the end of your talk. I'm going to put up two questions that are related. So the first one is, could you tell us more about your views on the potential costs and benefits of central banks issuing digital currency? And then following that, do you then foresee a major fiat digital currency on the horizon? And what would the implications be for that leading nation? So can you flesh out the decision that a central bank might need to go through in terms of deciding whether to issue a digital currency, and what some of those pros and cons are?
Zhang: Okay. Like I said a moment ago, there are varied practices among the central banks in the entire world. They have different views. Basically two camps—one is saying the central bank digital currencies. It's not helpful. And it’s probably too early to say which direction it will go. The other camp of course is saying that opportunities cannot be missed. And work should start right away. And in practice, of course, nobody now issues the central bank digital currencies except some of the countries that really had the problems with their existing money, countries like Venezuela and also some of the small economies, where they have the problems in terms of money laundering and the serious problems in terms of circulations, or have the problems of high hyperinflation and so forth.
But in reality, we haven't seen any other country announce formally the digital money to replace their own money. But nonetheless, we see that some arguments are valid. For example, the digital currencies—the central bank, if you issue it yourself, and people are saying this is taking control of your—as a central bank, only a central bank issues money as the credibility can maintain and assume the functions, being the central bank money and to basically serve the functions being of the intermediations, that value units, and so forth. So they consider these are an advantage. And also, if you have a digital central bank money and you were broadening your monetary policies—for example, negative interest rates and so forth—with a smaller cost.
On the other hand, of course, people also consider it's harder for the country to completely adopt the digital currencies with all of the problems still around. And we probably need the entire infrastructure to change, and we probably have a long way to go and so forth. So what I can say is yes, people are actively looking at the ways to try to not lose out, to lose control, in a sense, in these areas to the private sectors.
Tkac: So following up on that, this question got eight votes and it gets to your last point. How important is blockchain in protecting ownership rights? And following up on what you just said, how uncomfortable are governments with the prospect of being disintermediated?
Zhang: Well, that's a good one. The central bank is a highly centralized system versus these technologies, it's pretty much decentralized. In terms of natures, they are going opposite directions. But I say this not only because I was a former central banker, I should that in economic ecologies we are facing in this moment, you see all kinds of the shocks and dislocations. The mandate of the central banks, being the guardians of the financial stabilities, is not the time to be reduced, but also has to be enhanced. There has to be lenders to play that kind of role. And the decentralized systems of the private sectors—I think it's harder to play that kind of role, that sort of short answers.
And technology itself, of course, people argue that in this moment, the technology is not up to meet expectations in terms of the speed, in terms of the response, in terms of the cost. But of course, we have to give them a doubt of benefit that the next generation of the technology could minimize the cost, could reduce the time to respond, to a substantial extent so that these technologies can be served in a more decentralized way. That's certainly a challenge to the central bank, how the central bank operates. I don't think that will replace the central bank entirely, but that will certainly pose challenges to the central bank in that we have to provide, play the role of the last resort, and also, in regular times, how to make the monetary policies, the transmissions—all these things we have to give probably a different thinking.
Tkac: Okay. So now let's back up to this broader fintech digitization of financial services. And we have several related questions, so I'll put up the one that got the most votes. Can you name specific developing countries that stand out in terms of embracing this digitization where it's driving growth in demonstrable ways? And then how is the IMF thinking about including these kinds of features, digitization and new financial technologies when you publish growth forecasts when you assess these economies? In particular, some developing countries and emerging markets.
Zhang: So far there are two kinds of developing countries with emerging markets. They share commonalities. The majority of these countries are sort of focused on the financial inclusions and trying to improve the payment systems. Make their reach wider and deeper to their remote areas, to the household sectors. And these are like I mentioned earlier, across the entire world. In Latin America, in Peru, and also in Africa, in Kenya, in Tanzania, in Uganda, in Sierra Leone, in Asia, of course, China, Indonesia. All of these are quite—the coverage is quite wide and service providers quite open, actually, as opposed to domestic service providers and international providers.
And in countries like Estonia—I'm not sure that Estonia is in terms of which categories it's an EU member. They tried to achieve the e-society, the e-identities, e-citizenship, so quite advanced. So these are...we are in the process to understand them better than...it looks like these are the first countries to have comprehensive applications using these technologies to not only in the financial sectors, but all the aspects of the social life in terms of the pension systems, tax systems. But also, this is not only the developing countries but also the advanced country. Or we see the countries so we encourage them the applications of the fintech in the fiscal policy areas as well.
Tkac: I'm going to invoke my moderator's privileged and ask you about something that occurred to me while you were talking. You spoke about the borderless nature of crypto assets and these challenges that all of the economies developing and advanced are having in terms of these more decentralized fintech activities. What's your opinion or what are your thoughts or the thoughts of the Fund around the level of international regulatory cooperation that might be needed? Can we achieve it with the regulatory infrastructure we have that operates internationally? Or does there need to be a new focus? A new philosophy around international cooperation? And then does the Fund have a role to play in some of the things you mentioned about governance and standard setting that might help support such an international coordination?
Zhang: Sure. Given the nature, like I said, the borderless transactions in the crypto asset and also the technology applications—certainly, cooperation is necessary. And the Fund, of course, like I said—we have 189 memberships, so it is natural for us to talk to each other, and we encourage them to talk to each other. So we already set up a high-level external groups covering the major countries. I think now from initially ten-plus countries and now probably around 20 countries or 40 countries, depending on the topics. And we have them meet regularly and talk regularly on these issues. At this moment, it is pretty much a peer-to-peer sharing the experiences with the aim to try to reach the consensus as early as possible.
And of course, we also encourage the topic to be discussed at the other international forums, including the G20. And I believe this year that the G20 summit, we're going to have some coverage of these areas. Of course, in terms of standard settings, you have coordinate with already the traditional or conventional standard setters. For example, in the areas of money launderings, and FATF [the Financial Action Task Force] is the one to have the standards that are settings. And in financial stability, the FSB [Financial Stability Board]—by the way, FSB also has a task force in this area. So I think the core operations among different national authorities and also between the international organizations have already been mobilized.
At this stage of course, there's no...the consensus leads us back to governance, leads us back to data; has been achieved at this moment. But I think the discussion has been quite comprehensive and issues become, one, more clear and of course, the new issues are emerging. But I'm quite optimistic there will be some things later on achieved to go in that direction.
Tkac: Well, thank you—tons of interesting questions. We unfortunately don't have time to get to because we're going to roll straight into our next session to talk about how the regulatory system might need to adapt to machines making decisions. But please welcome DMD Zhang, and thank you for your remarks. We very much enjoyed having you here.
Zhang: Thank you. Thank you all.