alhdzsz – Narratives of Fintech in BIS Speeches

BIS Fintech Speeches

Looking back, the 2014 conference marked the first time we used the term “digital financial inclusion”. It was also the first time most of the organisations present in this room came together to consider the shifting risks posed by the spread of digital transactional platforms designed to bring much needed services to the world’s financially under-served - then estimated at 2.5 billion.

Jaime Caruana, BIS, October 2016

FinTech Google Trends

Policy Narratives and Fintech

Narratives are ubiquitous and their political and cognitive importance has been recognized for a long time. Nevertheless, their systematicanalysis in political science and economics has lagged (Schlaufer et al. 2022; Roos and Reccius 2024).

[A]ll narratives are essentially normative, even when the voice of the narrator is well hidden (Patterson and Monroe 1998).

The concepts we use to build theory are themselves narratives, or the symptoms of narratives (Patterson and Monroe 1998).

Research Objectives / Hypotheses

To determine which central banks discuss fintech
- H: countries with less developed traditional finance sectors are more likely to discuss fintech
- H: countries with more independent financial authorities are more likely to discuss fintech
- H: countries where fintech is more salient are more likely to discuss fintech
To uncover prevalent themes in fintech policy discourse
- H: countries emphasize themes that address more salient domestic issues (e.g. financial inclusion/less infrastructure)

Workflow

Data Collection

Data was collected from the BIS Fintech collection which hosts monetary authority and BIS management speeches and lectures on the topic going back to 2014.
The BIS (2019) defines fintech as “technology-enabled innovation in financial services”.
The automated webscraping was performed using a headless firefox browser with the RSelenium package on April 30th, 2025, resulting in 675 observations in total.

Webscraping (`RSelenium`)

library(RSelenium)

human_pause <- function(min = 0.5, max = 1) {
  Sys.sleep(runif(1, min, max))
}

remote_firefox <- rsDriver(
    browser = "firefox",
    chromever = NULL,
    verbose = F,
    port = free_port() 
  )

remDR <- remote_firefox$client

remDR$open()
  
for (i in seq_len(nrow(df_urls))) {
    
  cat("Scraping text for", i, "of", nrow(df_urls), "\n")
    
  url <- df_urls$url[i]
  
  # PDFs are not scraped (yet...)  
  if (str_detect(url, "\\.pdf$")) {
      cat("Skipping PDF link:", url, "\n")
      next
    }
    
  remDR$navigate(url)
  
  human_pause(1.5, 3)
    
  # Extract speech text
  speech_text <- tryCatch({
      body_elem <- remDR$findElement(using = "css selector", 
                                     value = "#cmsContent")
      body_elem$getElementText()[[1]]
    }, error = function(e) {
      cat("No #cmsContent on", url, "\n")
      NA_character_
    })
    
    df_urls$text[i] <- speech_text

  human_pause()

  }

remote_firefox$server$stop()

Document Distribution

BIS Fintech Speeches Map

Fintech Speech Models

Equation 1 corresponds to the cross-sectional LOGIT model.

Where:

corresponds to the average propensity towards label c in country i
represents the number of ATMs per 100k people.
represents the share of the top 5 banks.
represents the share of people that have paid utilities with digital means.
represents the independence of the central bank.
represents the Google Trends search rank for .

Which countries talk about Fintech?

Natural Language Inference

The process of manual labeling of text segments for training new models is both costly and time consuming (Laurer et al. 2024).
Recently, researchers have shifted towards using pre-trained models such as LLMs and BERT-based models (Di Leo et al. 2025; Le Mens and Gallego 2025; Ivacic et al. 2024).
Small BERT-based language models are just as efficient at classification tasks while being both deterministic and (mostly) open-source (Burnham et al. 2024).

Labeling Process

Classification labels are derived inductively from a qualitative content analysis of a random sample of the corpus.

df_sample <- df %>% 
  sample_n(30)

df_sample %>%
  select(doc_id, text) %>%
  pwalk(~ write_lines(.y, 
                      file.path("output/bis_sample", 
                                paste0(.x, ".txt"))))

Each document has its own document id, subsequently each sentence is given its own sentence id keeping in line with tidy data principles.

Zero-Shot Classification

library(reticulate)

transformers <- import("transformers")

classifier <- transformers$pipeline("zero-shot-classification", 
                                    model = "mlburnham/Political_DEBATE_large_v1.0")

labels <- list("financial risk", 
               "economic growth", 
               "economic competition",
               "financial inclusion", 
               "financial innovation",
               "financial efficiency",
               "regulatory cooperation",
               "other")

# Define sentence classifier
classify_sentences_adaptive <- function(df, 
                                        classifier, 
                                        labels) {
  
    # Load required packages (as a block)
    required_packages <- c("dplyr", "tibble", "purrr", "reticulate")
    installed <- installed.packages()
    missing <- setdiff(required_packages, rownames(installed))
    if (length(missing) > 0) install.packages(missing)
    lapply(required_packages, require, character.only = TRUE)
    
    # Clean up and deduplicate labels
    unique_labels <- unique(unlist(labels))
    label_colnames <- make.names(unique_labels, unique = TRUE)
    
    # Function to classify a single sentence
    classify_single <- function(sentence) {
      result <- classifier(sentence, unique_labels)
      scores_r <- unlist(reticulate::py_to_r(result$scores))
      labels_r <- unlist(reticulate::py_to_r(result$labels))
      scores_named <- setNames(as.numeric(scores_r), labels_r)
      score_row <- setNames(
        lapply(unique_labels, function(lbl) scores_named[[lbl]] %||% NA_real_),
        paste0(label_colnames, "_score")
      )
      tibble::as_tibble(score_row)
    }
    
    # Apply classification to each sentence (sequentially)
    results <- purrr::map_dfr(df$sentence, classify_single)
    
    # Bind to original dataframe (returns data frame)
    dplyr::bind_cols(df, results)
}

system.time({
    df_classified <- classify_sentences_adaptive(
      df = df_tokens,
      classifier = classifier,
      labels = labels
    )
})

Classified Sentence Sample

doc_id	sentence_id	date	speaker_name	speaker_position	iso3c	sentence	financial.risk_score	economic.growth_score	economic.competition_score	financial.inclusion_score	financial.innovation_score	financial.efficiency_score	regulatory.cooperation_score	other_score
r240531a	r240531a_102	2024-05-31	Ms Rosanna Costa	Governor of the Central Bank of Chile	CHL	In short, we have reached a very efficient electronic transfer market with instant availability of funds.	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.309	0.691	0.000	0.000
r211208c	r211208c_33	2021-06-09	Ms Nina Stoyanova	Deputy Governor and Head of the Banking Department	BGR	PISA framework aims to cover not only the traditional payment schemes and instruments (e.g. payment cards), but also innovative instruments, such as digital payment tokens backed by assets (e.g. stablecoins).	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.023	0.941	0.036	0.000	0.000
r221017a	r221017a_36	2022-10-17	Mr Michael S Barr	Vice Chair for Supervision of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System	USA	For example, it is important for banks to understand some of the heightened liquidity risks they may face from certain types of deposits from crypto-asset companies.	0.980	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.020	0.000	0.000	0.000
r201223o	r201223o_44	2020-12-23	Yaron Amir	Governor of the Bank of Israel	ISR	An additional issue that we are promoting is securitization A securitization transaction is one in which a corporation issues bonds whose maturity is secured by expected cash flows.	0.062	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.935	0.001	0.000	0.001
r220719b	r220719b_28	2022-07-19	Mr Ravi Menon	Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore	SGP	Supply chain frictions began to emerge in H2 last year, even before the Russia-Ukraine conflict.	0.000	0.000	1.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000
r220906e	r220906e_131	2022-02-03	Mr Richard Doornbosch	President of the Centrale Bank van Curaçao en Sint Maarten	CUW	Better governance is lesser supervision.	0.079	0.075	0.095	0.075	0.075	0.142	0.104	0.354
r230905f	r230905f_29	2023-09-05	Mr Eddie Yue	Chief Executive	HKG	With a lower AB, timely and efficient funding management have become more important than they were when liquidity was plentiful.	0.006	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.994	0.000	0.000
r220630a	r220630a_3	2022-07-01	Prof Yaron Amir	Governor of the Bank of Israel	ISR	Before we dive into a discussion on the activity of payment-transferring money from one person or business to another-I would like to open with a more general question, maybe even semi-philosophical: What, essentially, is money?	0.023	0.024	0.021	0.028	0.258	0.115	0.022	0.510
r220603f	r220603f_15	2022-06-03	Prof Joachim Wuermeling	Member of the Executive Board	DEU	In 1928, he came up with chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs for short.	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.999	0.000	0.000	0.000
r221017d	r221017d_14	2022-10-17	Mr Burkhard Balz	Member of the Executive Board	DEU	If we look at Germany, for instance, the Bundesbank found in a recent survey on payment behaviour that the share of cash transactions has fallen to 58%.2 The trend is obvious: in the previous studies from 2020 and 2017, cash payments accounted for 60% and 74%, respectively.	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	1.000	0.000	0.000
r211109d	r211109d_29	2021-11-09	Mr Eddie Yue	Chief Executive	HKG	In other words, it's not just for the good times, but also, perhaps more importantly, for the bad times.	0.095	0.039	0.038	0.029	0.030	0.032	0.028	0.708
r221011b	r221011b_48	2022-10-11	Mr Ravi Menon	Managing Director	SGP	Linking faster payment systems solves the cross-border payments problem but not settlements.	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.858	0.142	0.000	0.000
r240416b	r240416b_28	2024-04-16	Mr Eddie Yue	Chief Executive	HKG	We envision this close-knit relationship between the public and private money to continue.	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.987	0.000	0.013	0.000	0.000
r230718l	r230718l_63	2023-06-13	Mr Felipe M Medalla	Governor	PHL	Because [in] much of the data that we are looking at, we did not have the kind of exchange rate changes that we were seeing.	0.036	0.042	0.022	0.021	0.021	0.037	0.021	0.802
r211230k	r211230k_49	2021-12-30	Mr Benjamin E Diokno	Governor	PHL	Still on speed, the Financial Institutions Strategic Transfer (FIST) Act was signed into law last February and the BSP issued its implementing regulations in May this year-even as banks' bad debts remain manageable to date.	0.318	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.263	0.381	0.039	0.000
r220112c	r220112c_62	2022-01-12	Dr Joachim Nagel	Member of the Executive Board	DEU	The Bundesbank must rise to this challenge, and it will do.	0.003	0.000	0.002	0.000	0.000	0.995	0.000	0.000
r211012e	r211012e_28	2021-10-12	Mr T Rabi Sankar	Deputy Governor	IND	Put another way, any fintech entity that provides such liquidity services is effectively functioning as a bank and therefore should be subjected to the same legal/regulatory/supervisory regime that a bank is subjected to.	0.022	0.000	0.125	0.000	0.778	0.072	0.003	0.000
r240617c	r240617c_64	2024-06-19	Ms Michelle W Bowman	Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System	USA	Does innovation meet customer demands for cheaper or new and innovative products?	0.000	0.000	0.233	0.000	0.767	0.000	0.000	0.000
r240306a	r240306a_49	2024-03-06	Mr Kazuo Ueda	Governor of the Bank of Japan	JPN	In doing so, it is necessary to consider, with a well-balanced perspective that takes into account both global and domestic circumstances, potential problems that could eventually arise even if we do not face an immediate problem at the moment.	0.013	0.012	0.012	0.011	0.011	0.012	0.012	0.918
r250407p	r250407p_2	2025-04-09	Ms Chiara Scotti	Deputy Governor	ITA	I would like to welcome you all to Banca d'Italia and thank the Global Tax Policy Center at the Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law of Vienna University for jointly organizing this conference to discuss the vital link between financial regulation and taxation in the new digital world.	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.768	0.081	0.150	0.000
sp201010	sp201010_84	2020-10-12	Agustín Carstens	General Manager of the BIS	BIS	Denn was zu Beginn dieses Jahres geschah, ähnelte einem Krieg.	0.070	0.067	0.073	0.071	0.071	0.065	0.068	0.515
r210910c	r210910c_36	2021-09-10	Mr Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour	Deputy Governor	MYS	An increase in temperature will lower the resilience of the agroecosystem against pests and pathogens, resulting in lower yields and quality of crops, affecting the supply of raw materials.	0.210	0.118	0.071	0.072	0.071	0.071	0.073	0.314
r211230l	r211230l_36	2021-12-30	Mr Benjamin E Diokno	Governor of Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas	PHL	With physical distancing now a norm, we have seen substantial increase in transactions in PESONet and InstaPay.	0.000	0.437	0.000	0.051	0.512	0.000	0.000	0.000
r230425o	r230425o_47	2023-04-25	Mr Felipe M Medalla	Governor of Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas	PHL	Finally, we are also moving toward an Open Finance Framework.	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.930	0.070	0.000	0.000
r230622a	r230622a_14	2023-06-22	Dr Jorgovanka Tabaković	Governor of the National Bank of Serbia	SRB	We have remained consistent in our determination to maintain the relative stability of the exchange rate not only to keep core inflation at a considerably lower level than headline, but also to preserve overall business, investment and consumer confidence.	0.000	1.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000
sp230222	sp230222_44	2023-02-22	Mr Agustín Carstens	General Manager of the BIS	BIS	These foreseeable gains may just be the tip of the iceberg of additional transformations.	0.095	0.684	0.000	0.000	0.221	0.000	0.000	0.000
r210428a	r210428a_33	2021-04-28	Mr Benjamin E Diokno	Governor of Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas	PHL	First, on financial digitalization-..	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.977	0.023	0.000	0.000
sp170918	sp170918_123	2017-09-18	Mr Jaime Caruana	General Manager	CHE	We should certainly maintain this attitude and level of commitment in order to deal effectively with the challenges that lie ahead of us.	0.100	0.113	0.100	0.130	0.114	0.112	0.135	0.197
r221104b	r221104b_80	2022-11-04	Mr Ravi Menon	Managing Director	SGP	So what is the problem with money that we are trying to solve?	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	1.000	0.000	0.000
r201223i	r201223i_26	2020-10-12	François Villeroy de Galhau	Governor of the Bank of France and Chairman of the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de resolution (ACPR)	FRA	On top of this, in our day-to-day supervision, we apply the regulation using a proportional approach.	0.045	0.016	0.018	0.017	0.018	0.025	0.061	0.799
r220830d	r220830d_56	2022-08-30	Mr Ravi Menon	Managing Director	SGP	Tokenisation enables the monetisation of any tangible or intangible asset.	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.990	0.010	0.000	0.000
r241111f	r241111f_32	2024-11-11	Mr Brad Jones	Assistant Governor (Financial System)	AUS	Foremost here are geopolitical risks, operational risks (including but not limited to cyber risks) and the risks associated with climate change.	0.264	0.051	0.069	0.050	0.052	0.053	0.050	0.411
r220225c	r220225c_204	2022-02-25	Dr Johannes Beermann	Member of the Executive Board	DEU	You see the wide range of possible key factors.	0.042	0.020	0.022	0.016	0.018	0.024	0.013	0.844
r210617d	r210617d_24	2021-06-17	Margarita Delgado	Deputy Governor	ESP	Moreover, given that these groups may be more vulnerable to fraud and the rising cyber threat, monitoring must be maximised.	0.491	0.011	0.011	0.012	0.012	0.011	0.053	0.398
r240531a	r240531a_44	2024-05-31	Ms Rosanna Costa	Governor of the Central Bank of Chile	CHL	However, there was a need to increase transparency and promote financial stability by mitigating systemic risk.	0.520	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.480	0.000	0.000
r210323d	r210323d_69	2021-03-23	Mr Howard Lee	Deputy Chief Executive	HKG	Conclusion I have highlighted just three areas, namely payment and CBDC, use of data, and digitalization of our own organization, as some of the key challenges many of us are facing.	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	1.000	0.000	0.000	0.000
r210607a	r210607a_12	2021-06-07	Ignazio Visco	Governor of the Bank of Italy	ITA	The prompt provision and exceptional quantity of liquidity provided by the central banks staved off tensions in the markets and restored broadly accommodative financial conditions.	0.274	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.726	0.000	0.000
r221116c	r221116c_113	2022-11-16	Burkhard Balz	Member of the Executive Board	DEU	As I have already indicated, we are well aware of this.	0.234	0.069	0.196	0.064	0.067	0.121	0.057	0.193
sp201217	sp201217_17	2020-12-17	Mr Benoît Cœuré	Head of the BIS Innovation Hub	BIS	3 See D Rees, "What comes next?	0.072	0.100	0.099	0.055	0.149	0.052	0.049	0.424
r230308l	r230308l_8	2023-03-08	Mr Fabio Panetta	Member of the Executive Board	ECB	We simply cannot afford to fall behind the curve: cybersecurity must be the backbone of digital finance.	0.018	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.982	0.000	0.000	0.000
r211202k	r211202k_16	2021-12-02	François Villeroy de Galhau	Governor of the Bank of France and Chairman of the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de resolution (ACPR)	FRA	The second generation, i.e. stablecoins – with mechanisms to stabilise their value against sovereign currencies – aims to provide a more comprehensive range of services with a global reach. (iii) Lastly, the emergence of decentralised market infrastructures: new technologies tend to reduce the use of financial intermediaries or centralised systems, often developed by central banks, such as TARGET2, the Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system for euro payments, or the TARGET2-Securities settlement platform, both of which were developed and are operated by the Eurosystem.	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.741	0.259	0.000	0.000
r240813c	r240813c_94	2024-08-14	Dr Michael Debabrata Patra	Deputy Governor	IND	I wish the Conference all success.	0.075	0.077	0.074	0.075	0.101	0.074	0.090	0.434
r230907e	r230907e_95	2023-09-07	Prof Joachim Wuermeling	Member of the Executive Board	DEU	While the past two years have been tough in terms of raising funds, German and European FinTech companies still have a lot of potential yet to be fulfilled.	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.997	0.003	0.000	0.000
r241126w	r241126w_54	2024-11-29	Gabriel Makhlouf	Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland	IRL	Such technologies could provide greater access and choice to people across the world to financial services.	0.000	0.000	0.050	0.097	0.800	0.053	0.000	0.000
r241104k	r241104k_12	2024-11-04	Mr Leong Sing Chiong	Deputy Managing Director (Markets & Development) of the Monetary Authority of Singapore	SGP	The beneficiary within Ant International's network can receive its funds in its domiciled currency, for instance US Dollar, in the form of a tokenised deposit.	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.027	0.972	0.001	0.000	0.000
r201204i	r201204i_3	2020-12-04	Mr Adnan Zaylani Mohamad Zahid	Assistant Governor	MYS	As a prestigious research academy, it needs to produce prestigious and breakthrough research, and it needs to have events like this dialogue to further advance the knowledge and exchange of ideas and the cause of Islamic Finance.	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	1.000	0.000	0.000	0.000
r211123d	r211123d_8	2021-11-23	Christine Lagarde	President of the European Central Bank	DEU	This role reversal is partly attributable to the contribution of European banking supervision.	0.000	0.000	0.010	0.000	0.000	0.009	0.980	0.000
r220811e	r220811e_3	2022-05-26	Mr Benjamin E Diokno	Governor of Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas	PHL	The Philippines continues to beat the odds.	0.000	1.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000
r231227f	r231227f_56	2023-09-28	Mr Constantinos Herodotou	Governor of the Central Bank of Cyprus	CYP	The aim is to reduce risks to the financial system, stemming from money laundering, terrorist financing, bypassing of sanctions, cyber-attacks, fraud or leakages of personal information.	0.996	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.004	0.000
r240828p	r240828p_88	2024-08-29	Shaktikanta Das	Governor of the Reserve Bank of India	IND	Recognising the same, international bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have outlined core principles governing AI, which include inclusive growth, respect for the rule of law and human rights, transparency and explainability, robustness and safety, and accountability.	0.000	0.978	0.000	0.000	0.001	0.000	0.021	0.000

Label Distribution (Checks)

Cross-sectional Analysis

The dependent variable for the cross-sectional analysis is the average sentence classification (2020-2025) score aggregated at the country level.
Independent variables are political-economy indicators for 2020. When data for 2020 is missing, 2021 is imputed.

cs_df <- classified_df %>%
  filter(date >= ymd("2019-12-31")) %>% 
  group_by(iso3c) %>%
  summarise(across(ends_with("_score"),
                   list(mean = ~mean(.x, na.rm = TRUE)),
                   .names = "{.col}_{.fn}"))

Label Models

Equation 2 corresponds to the cross-sectional OLS model.