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This supervisory policy outlines the Bank of Canada’s (the Bank) powers and procedures to refuse to register applicants or revoke the registration of payment service providers (PSPs) based on the criteria established in the RPAA and its associated regulations.

This report presents the details of a new semi-annual survey that will improve the Bank of Canada’s surveillance across the financial system and deepen efforts to engage with financial system participants. The survey collects expert opinions on the risks to and resilience of the Canadian financial system as well as on emerging trends and financial innovations. The report presents an overview of the survey and provides high-level results from the spring 2018 survey.

Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers discusses how productivity growth can boost Canada’s prosperity and resilience. She also outlines how upcoming financial sector reforms are designed to increase competition.

The Canadian fixed-income market is in the midst of a structural transformation similar to those occurring in other national financial markets around the world. The authors examine recent developments and trends in the market and discuss their possible effects. The simultaneous shrinking of the federal government's financial requirements and steady rise in issues of corporate securities have significantly altered the composition of Canada's fixed-income market. Government of Canada securities constitute a predominant portion of outstanding fixed-income securities and play a pivotal role, serving as benchmarks for the valuation of other traded securities and as a hedging vehicle for market participants trying to control their exposure to risk. The reduced issuance of federal government securities has contributed to a decline in the liquidity of the benchmark market. This raises broader issues regarding the future of the Canadian fixed-income market, since the corporate market is still fairly underdeveloped and illiquid compared with that for Government of Canada issues. There are thus currently few benchmark and hedging alternatives. The federal government is, however, committed to preserving the integrity of the market for benchmark issues and is adopting initiatives to enhance market liquidity and alleviate some of the pressures on the effective supply of these securities. Another evolving trend in the market is the emergence of electronic trading platforms. These platforms have the potential to facilitate the price-discovery mechanism, increase cost efficiency, and improve the liquidity and transparency of the market.

We present a tool for creating density nowcasts for Canadian real GDP growth. We demonstrate that the combined densities are a reliable and accurate tool for assessing the state of the economy and risks to the outlook.

We build a network formation game of firms with trade flows to study the adoption and usage of a new digital currency as an alternative to correspondent banking.

We revisit an old question: how do financial constraints affect the transmission of monetary policy to the real economy? To answer this question, we propose a simple empirical strategy that combines firm-level employment and balance sheet data, identified monetary policy shocks and survey data on financing activities.

Our paper employs smartphone data to construct an improved cash access metric by accounting for both spatial agglomeration and households’ travel patterns. We find that incorporating trip-chaining into the travel metric could show that travel costs are from 15 to 25% less than not incorporating trip-chaining and that the biggest decrease is driven by rural residents.

We present a two-stage model of mobile phone and mobile payment usage that controls for selectivity. This reveals unobserved factors that work against having a mobile phone and toward mobile paying. Therefore, people who are unable to acquire or choose not to own a mobile device might have unmet payment needs.

Deputy Governor Timothy Lane explains how the Bank of Canada is preparing for a future where Canadians may need a digital currency issued by their central bank.