BIS Innovation Hub to expand to new locations in Europe and North America

The Board of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) today announced the expansion of the BIS Innovation Hub with the establishment of new Hub centres across Europe and in North America in cooperation with member central banks.

In the next two years, the BIS will open centres in collaboration with the Bank of Canada (Toronto), the Bank of England (London), the European Central Bank/Eurosystem (Frankfurt and Paris) and four Nordic central banks (Danmarks Nationalbank, the Central Bank of Iceland, the Central Bank of Norway and Sveriges Riksbank) in Stockholm. The BIS will also form a strategic partnership with the Federal Reserve System (New York).

The BIS Innovation Hub is an investment in the future of central banking and the financial system.

These new centres will expand our reach significantly and help create a global force for fintech innovation.

The expansion will build on the foundation already put in place by the first three Hub Centres – in Hong Kong SAR with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, Singapore with the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and Switzerland with the Swiss National Bank.

With this expansion, the Innovation Hub will be well placed to advance work on a broad range of issues of importance to the central banking community, including digital currency and digital payments, cyber security, distributed ledger technology and artificial intelligence.

This expansion is a testament to the central banking community’s commitment to innovation and cooperation.

Notes to editors:

The BIS Innovation Hub was established in 2019 to identify and develop in-depth insights into critical trends in financial technology of relevance to central banks, to explore the development of public goods to enhance the functioning of the global financial system, and to serve as a focal point for a network of central bank experts on innovation. Among the projects currently under way are explorations into the development of regulatory and supervisory technological practices, the global payment stack, tokenisation, digitalisation of the trade process and monitoring of fast-paced markets.

The BIS’s Annual Economic Report 2020 contains a special chapter on central banks and payments in the digital era.