France’s central bank is testing blockchain technology and opening a lab to work with startups, François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Banque de France, said.

Speaking at the Paris FinTech Forum last month, de Galhau said that the central bank and the ACPR (Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de resolution) believe that the digital revolution is creating challenges but also opportunities that are just waiting to be seized, whether by FinTechs themselves, by the entire financial system – banks and insurers – or by the French and European economy as a whole.

“The artificial intelligence and chatbots you are developing will help us respond more effectively to the public’s needs; big data, machine learning and biometrics will help us to better prevent fraud;  blockchain technology and smart contracts will help to optimise transactions; and your APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and open source technologies will help to make financial technologies more interoperable”, he said.

Speaking of regulation technology or “RegTech”, de Galhau called upon market players for their active participation.

“We need your answers in order to transpose PSD2 quickly and efficiently; we also need your active involvement in order to build the best possible RegTech”, he added.

Furthermore, he emphasized on the need to increase innovation and its diffusion for driving growth and competitiveness of an economy. de Galhau believes that the digitalisation of the financial sector can accelerate this process.

“It [digitalisation of the financial sector] helps to disseminate technological advances such as electronic signatures, solutions to defend against cyber-attacks or distributed ledger technologies. Innovative and secure payment solutions, such as tomorrow’s blockchains, are also helping to speed up the development of e-commerce and modernise physical trade”, he added.

In his concluding remarks, de Galhau told attendees:

“We, as regulators, regard innovation as key. Within Europe, France has many strengths that can make it a leader in the digital transition. You are the driving force in this, with your audacity and your successes; it is up to us – the Banque de France and the ACPR – to ensure that we are capable partners - vigilant when necessary and always open minded. Rest assured we are fully mobilised towards this goal.”