The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) recently announced that Maha El Dimachki will join the BIS Innovation Hub (BISIH) team as “the new head of the Singapore Centre, starting on 1 October 2023.”
Ms El Dimachki is currently Head of Early and High Growth Oversight at the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), “leading a team in charge of providing supervisory support for start-up firms.”
Previously, she reportedly “headed the FCA‘s payments department and served as chief payments officer of Pay.UK, the country’s operator of retail interbank payment systems.”
She also had senior positions in commercial banks.
Cecilia Skingsley, Head of the BIS Innovation Hub, stated:
“I am delighted to welcome Maha to the BIS Innovation Hub. She brings a rich set of experiences from both public and private sector and she understands the importance of rules while allowing for innovations. With a rich international background and a purpose-driven agenda especially in payments, Maha brings great skills and values to the team at the Singapore Centre,”
Ms El Dimachki, an Australian national, “has a degree in commerce marketing from Macquarie University in Sydney and a master’s in Public Policy from the London School of Economics.”
The BIS Innovation Hub Centre in Singapore was “established in 2019.”
Its projects have “focused on Central Bank Digital Currencies (Projects Dunbar and Mariana; technology applied to supervision and regulation (Viridis and Ellipse) and next-generation financial market infrastructures (Nexus).”
It is currently “collaborating with the central banks of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand as they work towards connecting their domestic payment systems.”
In another recent update from BIS, it was noted that inflation has “started to subside from multi-decade highs almost everywhere, but the work of central banks is far from done.” This, according to the Bank for International Settlements flagship economic report.
Despite the most intensive monetary policy tightening in recent memory, “the last leg of the journey to restore price stability will be the hardest.”
According to the BIS‘s Annual Economic Report 2023:
“The gains made so far in the fight against inflation owe much to supply chains easing and commodity prices falling. But labor markets are still tight and price growth in services has proved harder to tame. There is a material risk that an inflation psychology will take hold, where wage and price increases start to reinforce each other. Interest rates may need to stay higher for longer than the public and investors expect.”
