Once true digital money is available on blockchain networks, the token revolution will begin. What that money will be is coming into focus. The idea that cryptocurrencies and Stablecoins will one day replace fiat currencies seems less realistic today than at any time since blockchain technology was first applied to traditional financial markets. In fact, the most plausible future of money is now one in which an inverted pyramid of tokenised deposits sits on top of a fulcrum made of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). It looks awfully like a past and present in which commercial bank money (including e-money) sits on a fulcrum of central bank money. Which suggests that national and international monetary establishments have reasserted their control of money, defeating the ambitions of the libertarians and the innovators that spawned myriad cryptocurrencies. The truth is more complex. The innovative ideas and technologies of the cryptocurrency pioneers are now being embedded in a monetary system that is evolving towards faster, cheaper, more transparent and more open forms of money and payment but which has yet to find its equilibrium. Instead of re-visiting details, such as CBDC design choices or the regulation of Stablecoins, this webinar discussion will stick to a higher-level question: What is the likeliest future of money now?What topics will be discussed?Is regulation intended to restore public confidence in cryptocurrencies or destroy it?Are CBDCs in major currencies ready to move beyond the experimental stage?Are CBDCs a workable solution to inefficiency in cross-border payments?Are CBDCs relevant to making domestic payments faster?Are Stablecoins now a relic of the cryptocurrency past?Are tokenised deposits a glimpse at the future of commercial bank money?Is atomic settlement a flawed concept?Why is netting making a comeback?Where do Fnality, Partior and the ideas of The Regulated Liability Network (RLN) fit into the future of money?Has T+1 accelerated or postponed the payments revolution?Is tokenised, programmable money a reality already?Could all forms of digital money and digital assets be issued, traded, stored and serviced on a common, programmable platform?Who is on the panel?Matthew OsborneSenior Manager for Payments Policy at Bank of England https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-osborne-49552716/Jack FletcherHead of Policy and Government Relations (Digital Currencies) at R3 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-fletcher-465060101/Mathias StudachHead Finance, Risk and Organisational Development at SDX https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathias-studach-77a427a0/Moderated by Dominic HobsonCo-Founder at Future of Finance https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominic-hobson-49b8222/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Competition in equities trading in developed markets is now so well-established that it seems to have existed forever. In reality it is as much a creation of regulators as of the digital technology that has enabled stock markets to dispense with physical floors and reach across national borders. True, NASDAQ can trace its history back to 1971, but competition was massively accelerated in the United States by Regulation National Market System (or Reg NMS) of 2005. A similar measure in Europe, the first iteration of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) in 2007, began the process of breaking the domestic stock exchange monopolies of the member-states of the European Union (EU). But now the future lie clearly with the digitisation of data and the digitalisation of processes. Someone who has been at the heart of disruption and innovation in the stock exchange industry throughout the years of upheaval is Alasdair Haynes, the founder and CEO of Aquis Exchange, which he set up in 2012 after spells as CEO at both Chi-X Europe (now part of Cboe) and ITG International (now Virtu), to prove his belief that subscription revenue and the Cloud are as relevant to stock exchanges as large corporations. He spoke to Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The voluntary carbon credit market has emerged rapidly as a market-friendly way of combating climate change. It has attracted blockchain-based entrepreneurs that see carbon credits as ripe for tokenisation, in large part because a novel idea developed by people outside the traditional financial services industry has yet to develop an infrastructure capable of hosting issuers, investors and traders safely. Greenwashing, double-counting, lack of transparent prices, an absence of trustworthy intermediaries and even outright fraud are prevalent. Existing efforts to overcome the lack of information and integrity in carbon offset projects have not met with success but both policymakers and institutional quality infrastructure providers are now getting involved, and hopes are rising that the carbon credit market will grow rapidly. But there are formidable obstacles to overcome.What topics will be discussed?Carbon taxes are a mess (e.g., fossil fuels are subsidised as well as taxed, and at differential rates). Is that good or bad for the carbon credit market?What is preventing the carbon credit market from growing?Registries do not seem to have solved the integrity problem in carbon credit markets. What can (e.g., the ICVCM Core Carbon Principles (CCPs))?Which bodies – securities or futures or commodities regulators – should regulate the carbon credit markets?The Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets (TSVCM) advocated “core” carbon spot and futures contracts as “reference contracts” for other carbon credits. Has that idea progressed?Can and should carbon credit contracts be standardised?Can existing securities and commodities market infrastructures play a role – or is a completely new infrastructure required?How might carbon credit markets can be linked to ETS markets, potentially enhancing liquidity?Is tokenisation an appropriate technology for the carbon credit market?Does it make more sense to issue carbon credits natively on to a blockchain or to tokenise existing carbon credits?Is the lack of digital money a problem in the tokenised carbon credit markets as it is in the other token markets (and, if so, are Stablecoins an answer?)What might the carbon credits market of the near future actually look like?How durable are carbon credits as an asset class? To what extent are asset managers and asset owners deluding themselves that sustainable investing can also deliver high returns (echoing politicians that dress up costs as benefits)?Who is on the panel?James C. Row, Founder and Managing Partner at Entoro Capital, LLC, a middle-market, traditional and alternative investment bank based in Houston, Texas, and CEO of Capturiant. Deanna Reitman, Partner Head of Carbon and Commodities at DLA PiperSean Mullins, Senior Vice President – Digital Assets and Financial Markets at Northern Trust Gbemi Oluleye, Assistant Professor (Lecturer), at Imperial College LondonModerated by Dominic Hobson, Co-Founder at Future of Finance Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Co-founders of R3, Chief Technology Officer Richard Brown and Chief Strategy Officer Todd Mcdonald.R3 first came to public attention in 2015 when a group of major financial institutions and technology vendors backed the company to work out how blockchain technologies could be applied to regulated financial markets. More than six years on, R3 is the established enterprise software company behind a host of live and soon-to-be-live blockchain-based networks across multiple asset classes. In that time, its founders have learned a great deal about how regulated financial institutions think about and adopt blockchain technology, the balance that must be struck between competition and collaboration, the importance of inter-operability between networks and how to build a business case within a major financial institution. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance spoke to two of the founders of R3, Chief Technology Officer Richard Brown and Chief Strategy Officer Todd Mcdonald, about their experience and their expectations for the future. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Gerard Smith, vice president and head of product-digital assets, at Nasdaq (Marketplace Technology).Financial market infrastructures (FMIs), from exchanges through central counterparty clearing houses (CCPs) to central securities depositories (CSD), must maintain a difficult balance between regulatory compliance, technological stability and operational resilience and the need to expand capabilities, contain costs and future-proof their franchises through technological transformation. A recent survey of post-trade developments, published by Nasdaq in conjunction with ValueExchange, found FMIs and their clients wrestling with what might be called the Tancredi Test: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Gerard Smith, vice president and head of product-digital assets, at Nasdaq (Marketplace Technology), about what the survey tells us of FMI responses to budget constraints, user demands, T+1, AI and blockchain technologies and tokenisation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Peter Gargone, CEO of Ntier Financial Services.Data is now at the heart of every efficiency initiative in financial services: investing, trading, operations, risk management and compliance. The advent of blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies are altering the nature of the relationship between data and technology, even as they make it easier to solve some age-old problems in data aggregation and management. Peter Gargone is CEO of Ntier Financial Services, a company he set up more than 20 years ago after experiencing at first hand the challenges investment banks faced in managing and using their data. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to him about how regulatory demands are revealing new opportunities in the processing and integration of both internal and external data. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the minds of many, the digital art market is indelibly associated with Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), which boomed and then bust in 2021-22, accompanied by the further taint of money laundering and insider dealing. But art was digital long before OpenSea sought to democratise it and its future remains sufficiently rosy for Sotheby’s to have launched a peer-to-peer digital art market of its own in the Spring of 2023. What digital art has lacked is what the art market has lacked – namely, data on which to base valuations – and with less excuse than its analogue ancestor. After all, the digital art market is as surrounded and saturated by digitised data as any other market. But until now the digital art market has lacked not only its equivalents of Bloomberg or Reuters to provide the relevant data but the equivalent of BlackRock Aladdin to aggregate and analyse it. UNTITLED GEN, a quantitative investment advisory firm that is using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to sift digitised data for information useful to digital artists and digital art investors, has emerged to plug the gap. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Clemens Wessendorff and Simon Zimmerman, the co-founders of UNTITLED GEN. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

InvestaX is a tokenisation platform for real and privately managed asset funds based – where else? – in Singapore, the financial centre that is doing more than any other jurisdiction to turn the idea of tokenisation into a reality. Like others in Singapore, including the regulators, the founders of InvestaX believe that DeFi innovations such as automated market-making have an institutional future – and not only because their experience dates back to the ICO boom of 2017-18, that intensely creative period in which the origins of tokenisation lie. To be part of its institutional future, InvestaX has secured operating licences from the regulators and chosen to work with regulated institutions on both the cash and custody sides of its business. And they are operating in the most progressive financial eco-system on the planet, where institutional DeFi is being built by regulators and regulated. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Alice Chen, co-founder, chief operating officer and general counsel at InvestaX. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

130 central banks around the world are now exploring the merits of issuing a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) but as recently as 2015 not a single one was doing that, even though the idea of digital money dates back to the 1990s. The founders of eCurrency, on the other hand, a Dublin-headquartered company with deep roots in Silicon Valley, have been thinking about CBDCs ever since the great financial crisis of 2007-09. Unlike Satoshi Nakamoto, however, their concern was not to use technology to create a trustless, peer-to-peer alternative to the failed fiat currency system controlled by central bank and commercial bank intermediaries, but to rejuvenate central bank money by making it available to households and consumers via the Internet. eCurrency now offers a technology that enables central banks to mint a purely digital form of fiat currency that functions as a bearer instrument – an Internet version, if you like, of physical notes and coins. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Jonathan Dharmapalan, CEO of eCurrency. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Download the Future of Finance Stablecoins Paper NowRegulated banks are waking up to the threats and opportunities created by the decision to bring Stablecoins within the regulatory perimeter. In both domestic and international payments and securities markets, regulated Stablecoins offer liberation from the status quo as well as the threat of disintermediation. Where doing nothing is not a survivable option, understanding exactly what is going on is essential to the formulation of a viable strategy.What topics were discussed?Have Stablecoins escaped their origins in the cryptocurrency markets?What makes Stablecoins unstable?Are Stablecoins a vector of contagion that threatens financial stability?How do tokenised deposits differ from Stablecoins?How do Stablecoins create credit?Could Stablecoins develop into a shadow banking system?How will Stablecoins inter-operate with central bank digital currencies?For banks, are Stablecoins friend or foe?Do Stablecoins threaten non-bank incumbents in the payments industry?How are Stablecoins being regulated in the major financial centres?What is the capital treatment of Stablecoins?Must non-bank issuers of Stablecoins secure banking licences?Are Stablecoins the future of international and/or domestic payments?Are Stablecoins the key to the growth of tokenised digital assets markets?Are Stablecoins an end-state or an intermediate stage in the evolution of money?Download the Future of Finance Stablecoins Paper NowThe panelGilbert Verdian CEO at Quant https://www.linkedin.com/in/gverdian/Amarjit Singh Partner | EMEIA Assurance Blockchain Leader | Financial Services at EY https://www.linkedin.com/in/amarjit-singh-jeet/Ricardo Correia Senior Technology Executive at R3 https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricardo-m-correia/Keith Bear Fellow at the Centre for Alternative Finance at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-bear-2b7407/Moderated by Dominic Hobson Co-Founder at Future of Finance https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominic-hobson-49b8222/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The asset management industry has grown fat on a quarter-century of exceptionally loose central bank monetary policies. Ever-rising asset values have allowed managers to largely ignore shrinking fees, rising costs, failed outsourcing and offshoring arrangements and a long-term secular trend from high margin active investment strategies to low-margin passive alternatives. But now a combination of rising interest rates, the reversal of quantitative easing and geopolitical and market uncertainties have exposed a fragile business model, putting profitability on a downward trajectory. The threat has woken asset managers to the need for radical change. Vendors that once found it hard to interest the industry in new ways of generating revenue and cutting costs are getting more than a hearing – they are taking on clients. One of the newcomers is FundGuard, a Cloud-based software as a service platform for investment management and administration whose initial mission is to transform an area that once seemed immune to technological change: fund accounting. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of the Future of Finance, spoke to FundGuard president John Lehner.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The existence of Montis, which is building an infrastructure to support the issuance, settlement, safekeeping and servicing of digital assets, is a measure of the transformative potential of tokenisation. Yet Montis is also a measure of the curious lack of interest of most established central securities depositories (CSD) in tokenisation, as threat let alone as opportunity. The newcomer, unaffected by apparent setbacks in the CSD industry such as ASX and ID2s, is backed by a widening array of engaged incumbents as well as issuers and investors and operating in an increasingly supportive legal and regulatory environment. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Martin Watkins, chief executive officer at Montis Group Limited, about why Montis exists, what benefits it brings, what products and services it offers, how it is working with regulators and within evolving legal regimes, and how its positioning and strategy has adapted to the changing shape of the tokenisation opportunity set.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SDX, the exchange for digital assets built and operated by Swiss stock exchange SIX, is working to accelerate the tokenisation of financial assets in Switzerland, Singapore and Germany, three locations whose legal and regulatory environments are accommodating of the new method of raising capital. Interestingly, the SDX strategy is an open one that looks to embrace competitors as well as issuers and investors as the company builds a network of networks of tokenisation platforms and their users. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke about the SDX strategy with Alex Kech, who took up the post of Head of Digital Securities at SDX in November 2022. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It is easy to fall into the trap of treating monetary innovations such as Stablecoins in isolation, or as a final destination, when innovation is in fact constant and individual innovations are merely components of much larger secular trends driven by technology and the interaction of technology with the wants and needs of households and businesses. One organisation that has not made this mistake, and places Stablecoins firmly in the context of a financial system evolving towards programmable money, is Quant. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Gilbert Verdian, CEO of Quant, about what he sees in the Stablecoin phenomenon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When it came to digital money useable on blockchain networks, the choice between central bank money and commercial bank money used to feel binary: Stablecoins and tokenised deposits and e-money were stopgaps pending the introduction of CBDCs. But as the threat of Stablecoins that were either global or issued by unregulated non-banks has receded, a more traditional hierarchy of money has asserted itself. CBDCs are likely to become the central bank digital money foundation on which myriad forms of digital commercial bank money will blossom.Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) originated in need (to put fiat currency on blockchain networks) but also fear. Central banks were fearful that private forms of money based on blockchain technology would rob them of control of national and international monetary conditions. These fears were crystallised by the prospect of Facebook issuing a multi-currency Stablecoin called Libra.Having crushed Libra – whose remnants were sold to digital asset bank Silvergate in January 2022 – developed market central banks around the world are now bringing Stablecoins within the regulatory perimeter by privileging banks as issuers and prescribing what assets they can use to back a Stablecoin. This has released much of the pressure on the major central banks to issue CBDCs.There are currently just four CBDCs actually in issue – the Bahamas Sand Dollar, the Eastern Caribbean Dcash, the Nigerian eNaira and the Jamaican JAM-DEX – and all are developing slowly, with limited take-up. Significantly, all four were issued in developing economies, where the benefits of CBDCs in promoting financial inclusion and fighting financial crime are easiest to capture.Of another 93 countries exploring a CBDC – as monitored by the Atlantic Council CBDC Tracker – the most advanced (Brazil and Kazakhstan) fit the pattern. In all, just 17 are at the pilot testing stage. Of them, the Swedish eKrona project is the only one being pursued by a Western economy. 72 central banks are still developing or researching their plans, and the rest have stopped doing even that. True, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) website records ten CBDC experiments in progress, with various combinations of banks and central banks taking part, and it is not hard to find others where the BIS is not involved. So the leading central banks have not lost interest in CBDCs, but they do now seem relaxed enough to let the private sector lead the digitisation of money.This reflects a consensus that a CBDC in a developed market must not disintermediate the commercial banks through which central banks influence monetary conditions. Nor are most central banks credible providers of customer-facing services such as digital wallets, foreign exchange and checking customers are not money launderers, terrorists or sanctioned businesses or individuals.There is an even more profound sense in which central banks are content to cede the leadership role, and it is this: CBDCs are emerging as the foundation of a layered system of issuance and distribution in which asset-backed Stablecoins issued by regulated banks, tokenised cash on deposit at regulated banks and e-money backed by cash held at regulated banks will provide the bulk of digital monies.To carry on reading, go to : https://futureoffinance.biz/is-this-how-cbdcs-will-happen-in-the-major-global-currencies/PanellistsRicardo CorreiaSenior Technology Executive at R3 Gilbert VerdianCEO at QuantBarney ReynoldsPartner, Global Head Financial Institutions, Governance & Advisory at Shearman and SterlingKeith BearFellow at the Centre for Alternative Finance, Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There is now widespread acceptance that digital assets are going to co-exist alongside traditional assets for a long time. That implies that issuers and investors will need a market infrastructure that renders issuers indifferent as to whether a source of liquidity is digital or traditional and investors indifferent as to whether an exposure is available in digital form or in traditional form. Both sides of the market just need something that works efficiently at low cost with minimal disruption to the status quo. D7, the Cloud-based post-trade infrastructure Clearstream is building to link the digital and the traditional securities markets, aims to provide exactly that. Dominic Hobson, Co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Michael Crezelius, Head of the Issuer CSD at Clearstream, and Thilo Derenbach, Head of Commercialisation and Digitisation at Clearstream, about how D7 does what it does now – the service is in production already - and what it will do in the future. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The decision by regulators to bring bank-issued Stablecoins within the scope of regulation is helping to fashion a vision of the future of money in which central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) play a role not unlike the one existing forms of central bank money play in the money markets of today: underpinning innovation and experimentation in different forms of money and different ways of making payments by both banks and non-banks without putting monetary, financial and operational stability at risk. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Ricardo Correia, Head of Digital Currencies at R3, where he leads a team that is working with central banks, banks and financial market infrastructures on a variety of projects exploring the potential of CBDCs and fiat-backed Stablecoins.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Privately managed assets have become the default choice for tokenisation enthusiasts. The reasoning behind their choice is hard to fault. The advertised benefits of tokenisation apply a fortiori to the asset class. Privately managed assets – especially hedge funds and real estate, but also equity issuers that might previously have used the private placement or crowd-funding markets to raise capital – account for a disproportionate share of token issues so far. But are the enthusiasts and the pioneering issuers missing the point of tokenisation? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tokenisation may be making limited headway in the conventional securities markets but it is attracting considerable interest in less familiar asset classes. 360X, the digital assets marketplace backed by Deutsche Börse and Commerzbank, aims to tokenise rights in expert-verified and high-quality art, music and (in cooperation with Tectrex) real estate assets. 360X Music, which provides an infrastructure for structuring deals, issuing tokens and promoting them to investors, has already issued security tokens backed by music royalties, and 360X Art is set to follow. Dominic Hobson, Co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Fabian Schaum, Co-founder and CIO at 360X, about the progress the company is making with regulators as well as issuers and investors. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Securities are issued into CSDs. The integrity of every issue of securities is safeguarded by CSDs. Ownership of securities is recorded by CSDs. Transactions in securities are settled by CSDs. Securities are serviced by CSDs.So, if it happens, tokenisation will either disrupt or transform or eliminate these functions. It is therefore both an existential threat and an exciting opportunity for CSDs. What tokenisation is not is something that CSDs can afford to ignore.Attendees will hear speakers make the case for and against investing in tokenisation capabilities now. They will also be given the opportunity to vote on the Motion before the debate and again after the debate, to test whether minds were changed by the arguments. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.