Where Finance Finds Its Future

A Future of Finance Interview with Richard Brown, Chief Technology and Product Officer at R3.R3 celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. Richard G. Brown, R3's Chief Technology and Product Officer, speaks to Bob Currie about the drivers for Corda's design, how these are changing, and how far the company has fulfilled the targets that it envisaged at formation. The discussion explores the potential for convergence of private and public blockchain ecosystems, thereby potentially making a wider range of higher-quality assets available to DeFi investors and tapping into a large pool of demand and liquidity sitting on public blockchain. But what can we say at this stage about the mechanics of building this cross-chain interoperability?In bringing real-world assets to DeFi, we examine how to retain the simplicity and accessibility of permissionless chains while accommodating TradFi's complex lifecycles and risk protocols.In delivering convergence of public and private ecosystems, we address the difficulties in ensuring that financial institutions, and their regulators, are comfortable in transacting with investors or counterparties operating in a public ecosystem. What are the challenges in delivering the institutional-standard security and finality that these FIs will continue to expect? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 13 February 2025 BX Digital hosted a virtual seminar that addressed the question: “Token markets need liquidity: Where will they get it from?” The importance of the topic is obvious. A market in which assets can be bought and sold quickly without moving the price is bound to grow more quickly than one in which assets can be bought and sold slowly, if at all, and only by moving the price in an adverse direction. By this criterion, the cryptocurrency markets, let alone the tokenised asset markets, lack sufficient liquidity.The conventional solution is to attract more issuers and investors. Unfortunately, it is fallacious. The experience of traditional markets shows that liquidity is not generated sufficiently by buyers and sellers alone. Furthermore, liquidity must be manufactured by market-makers, lead brokers, securities dealers, inter-broker dealers, exchanges and trading venues, banks, investment banks, and principal and high frequency trading firms. Yet blockchain was invented precisely to get rid of intermediaries such as these. So the purpose of the discussion hosted by BX Digital was to test whether blockchain-based finance can indeed scale without intermediaries, whether tokenisation can make the generation of liquidity more efficient and what exchanges can do to encourage the growth of liquidity.The seminar, held in conjunction with Future of Finance, attracted 116 registrants. They heard Lidia Kurt, CEO of BX Digital, Michael J. Cyrus, Head of Short-Term Products, Equity Finance & FX at DekaBank, Mike Reed, Head of Partnership Development for Digital Assets at Franklin Templeton, Jasmine Burgess, Chief Risk Officer at Coinbase Asset Management, and Lloyd Wahed, Founder and CEO at Members Capital Management, discuss the question from a variety of angles. The registrants contributed to the discussion by completing an on-line poll. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Ciarán McGonagle, Chief Legal & Product Officer at Tokenovate.Tokenovate delivers post-trade automation for derivatives and securities finance trades. Chief Legal and Product Officer Ciarán McGonagle speaks to Future of Finance's Bob Currie about how the company is applying blockchain and smart contract technology to build a financial ecosystem that is automated, resilient and efficient.Representing a financial product as a bundle of rights and obligations governed by conditional logic, McGonagle reflects on the flexibility offered by smart contracts in managing the cash flows, transfers of ownership and other lifecycle events associated with these contracts. He explains how Tokenovate's unused transaction output (UTXO)-based model shapes the legal remedies available to asset owners in case of legal dispute or misappropriation – and how this may differ from other flavours of blockchain.Drawing on his previous experience working at ISDA, McGonagle discusses how Tokenovate is applying the common domain model (CDM) to translate standard representation of key trade terms into real-world systems and workflows. In closing, he reflects on how the company is contributing to public policy formation and potential outcomes from its representations in Washington and Brussels, its work with financial regulators and its participation at New York Climate Week. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 4 December 2024 Future of Finance hosted a one-day event at the offices of AON in London. Entitled Digital asset custody: What do asset managers and asset owners need to know about digital asset custody and custodians?, the event attracted 160 registrants from asset managers, banks, custodian banks, digital asset custodians, exchanges, financial market infrastructures, insurers, investment consultants, law firms, regulators and technology vendors. This is an account of what they and the panellists contributed to the seven sessions that day, both live and in the multiple-choice questionnaire they completed in advance, the results of which are also published here.The panellists for this discussion were Laurent Kssis, Board Member and Strategic Advisor to Issuance.Swiss AG; Philip Rage, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Soter Insure; Tariq Rasheed, a Partner at Reed Smith; Jeet Singh, Partner and EMEA Blockchain Leader at EY; and, as moderator, Ed Pugh, Development Director, Fintech and Digital Assets, at Aon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 4 December 2024 Future of Finance hosted a one-day event at the offices of AON in London. Entitled Digital asset custody: What do asset managers and asset owners need to know about digital asset custody and custodians?, the event attracted 160 registrants from asset managers, banks, custodian banks, digital asset custodians, exchanges, financial market infrastructures, insurers, investment consultants, law firms, regulators and technology vendors. This is an account of what they and the panellists contributed to the seven sessions that day, both live and in the multiple-choice questionnaire they completed in advance, the results of which are also published here.The panellists for this discussion were Glenn Morgan, Senior Vice President and Digital Asset Practice Leader at Aon; Anya Nova, Director of Sales, Europe at GK8 Custody; Donald Brouwer, Vice President of Business Development at Dfns; and Tom Pikett, Director and Digital Assets Product Manager at BNY. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 4 December 2024 Future of Finance hosted a one-day event at the offices of AON in London. Entitled Digital asset custody: What do asset managers and asset owners need to know about digital asset custody and custodians?, the event attracted 160 registrants from asset managers, banks, custodian banks, digital asset custodians, exchanges, financial market infrastructures, insurers, investment consultants, law firms, regulators and technology vendors. This is an account of what they and the panellists contributed to the seven sessions that day, both live and in the multiple-choice questionnaire they completed in advance, the results of which are also published here.The panellists for this discussion were James Pollock, EMEA Sales Director at Digital Asset; Kara Kennedy, Head of Digital Asset Product at J.P. Morgan Securities Services; Jürgen Hofbauer, Global Head of Strategic Partnerships at Taurus SA; Adam Groom, Head of Revenue and Exchanges EMEA at Copper; Thilo Derenbach, Head of Sales and Business Development, Digital Securities Services, at Clearstream; and, as moderator, Monica Summerville, Head of Capital Markets Technology Research at Celent. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 4 December 2024 Future of Finance hosted a one-day event at the offices of AON in London. Entitled Digital asset custody: What do asset managers and asset owners need to know about digital asset custody and custodians?, the event attracted 160 registrants from asset managers, banks, custodian banks, digital asset custodians, exchanges, financial market infrastructures, insurers, investment consultants, law firms, regulators and technology vendors. This is an account of what they and the panellists contributed to the seven sessions that day, both live and in the multiple-choice questionnaire they completed in advance, the results of which are also published here.The panellists for this discussion were John Siena, Associate General Counsel and Co-Head of Regulatory Strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH); Monica Gogna, Partner and Head of the Financial Institutions Law Group at EY; Romin Dabir, partner at Reed Smith; and Yvonne Deane Harte, Director for Secondary Markets and Post Trade policy at UK Finance. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 4 December 2024 Future of Finance hosted a one-day event at the offices of AON in London. Entitled Digital asset custody: What do asset managers and asset owners need to know about digital asset custody and custodians?, the event attracted 160 registrants from asset managers, banks, custodian banks, digital asset custodians, exchanges, financial market infrastructures, insurers, investment consultants, law firms, regulators and technology vendors. This is an account of what they and the panellists contributed to the seven sessions that day, both live and in the multiple-choice questionnaire they completed in advance, the results of which are also published here.The panellists for this discussion were Angie Walker, Global Head of Banking and Capital Markets at Chainlink; Anoosh Arevshatian, Group Chief Risk Officer at Zodia Custody; Keith O'Callaghan, Managing Partner at Archax Capital Limited; Qian Jian, Director, Digital Assets Strategy, SWIFT; and Dr Robert Barnes, co-CEO at BPX Digital Securities Exchange. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Sanjeev Birari, Co-Founder and CBO of Zoniqx.Zoniqx, the California based pioneer of tokenisation platforms as a service, believes artificial intelligence compliance and interoperability are the keys to scaling the transformation of real world assets into digital assets. Dominic Hobson, Co-Founder and Editorial Director at Future of Finance interviewed Sanjeev Birari, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of Zoniqx to explain more, please watch, listen and read the interview below. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 15 October 2024 Future of Finance hosted a one-day event at the offices of AON in London. Entitled Tokenisation of securities and funds is going to happen. How will you and your organisation survive it?, the event attracted 200 registrants from banks, asset managers, brokers, central banks, financial market infrastructures and FinTechs. This is an account of what they contributed to the six panels that day, as well as what they learned from the panellists and each other.This episode is a summary of Panel 6, titled What tokenisation will enable the financial markets to deliver tomorrow which they cannot provide today. The Panellists were Breige Tinnelly, Head of Market Development at Archax; Gary O'Brien, Head of Bank and Broker Segment Strategy, Securities Services at BNP Paribas Securities Services; and Ralf Kubli, blockchain investor and board member at the Casper Association. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 15 October 2024 Future of Finance hosted a one-day event at the offices of AON in London. Entitled Tokenisation of securities and funds is going to happen. How will you and your organisation survive it?, the event attracted 200 registrants from banks, asset managers, brokers, central banks, financial market infrastructures and FinTechs. This is an account of what they contributed to the six panels that day, as well as what they learned from the panellists and each other.This episode is a summary of Panel 5, titled "Why the benefits of tokenisation depend on the issuance of “native” rather than “asset-backed” (or "digital twin”) digital assets". The Panellists taking part were Anthony Woolley, Head of Business Development and Marketing at Ownera; Emma Lovett, Credit Lead for the Markets Distributed Ledger Technology team at J.P. Morgan; Ian Hunt, independent authority and adviser on buy-side business processes and technology; Vic Arulchandran, Director and Head of Digital Product and Market Design at Deutsche Börse| Clearstream; and Stephen McConville, Head of Structuring at Hedgehog Invest. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 15 October 2024 Future of Finance hosted a one-day event at the offices of AON in London. Entitled Tokenisation of securities and funds is going to happen. How will you and your organisation survive it?, the event attracted 200 registrants from banks, asset managers, brokers, central banks, financial market infrastructures and FinTechs. This is an account of what they contributed to the six panels that day, as well as what they learned from the panellists and each other.This episode is a summary of Panel 4, titled "How a common platform or unified ledger could unleash network effects in the token markets". The Panellists taking part were Ami Ben-David, Founder and CEO of Ownera; Austen Appleby, Senior Product Manager – Interoperability at R3; Edward Glyn, Managing Director and Head of Global Markets at Calastone; Emma Landriault, Vice President, Incubation and Architecture at J.P. Morgan Onyx Coin Systems; Jørgen Ouaknine, Global Head of Innovation and Digital Assets at Euroclear; and Lisa McClory, Digital Technologies Lead at D2 Legal Technology. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 15 October 2024 Future of Finance hosted a one-day event at the offices of AON in London. Entitled Tokenisation of securities and funds is going to happen. How will you and your organisation survive it?, the event attracted 200 registrants from banks, asset managers, brokers, central banks, financial market infrastructures and FinTechs. This is an account of what they contributed to the six panels that day, as well as what they learned from the panellists and each other.This episode is a summary of Panel 3, titled "Reasons other than lack of digital money that explain why tokenised securities and funds have failed to scale". The Panellists taking part were Jochen Metzger, Global Head of Markets at NowCM Group and CEO at NowCM Finance; Muneeb Shah, Head of Digital Assets Technology consulting at EY UK; Kushal Balluck, Senior Manager, Digital Securities Sandbox and Post Trade Innovation at the Bank of England; Soren Mortensen, Director, Global Financial Markets, at IBM; and Valérie Gilles Chief Commercial Officer and Partner at IZNES. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 15 October 2024 Future of Finance hosted a one-day event at the offices of AON in London. Entitled Tokenisation of securities and funds is going to happen. How will you and your organisation survive it?, the event attracted 200 registrants from banks, asset managers, brokers, central banks, financial market infrastructures and FinTechs. This is an account of what they contributed to the six panels that day, as well as what they learned from the panellists and each other.This episode is a summary of Panel 2, titled "Can securities and funds token markets can grow without genuine digital money on-chain?". The Panellists taking part were Damien Fontanille, Head of Business Development at Société Générale-FORGE; Jason Webb, Director of Web 3 at SS&C Technologies; Ben Brophy, Head of Blockchain at Fidelity International; and Daniel Coheur, Co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) of Tokeny. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 15 October 2024 Future of Finance hosted a one-day event at the offices of AON in London. Entitled Tokenisation of securities and funds is going to happen. How will you and your organisation survive it?, the event attracted 200 registrants from banks, asset managers, brokers, central banks, financial market infrastructures and FinTechs. This is an account of what they contributed to the six panels that day, as well as what they learned from the panellists and each other.This episode is a summary of Panel 1, titled "Why are the tokenised securities and fund markets failing to scale?". The Panellists taking part were Stefano Dalavalle, Head of Product – Digital Assets at R3; Sean Mullins, Senior Vice President - Digital Assets and Financial Markets at Northern Trust Corporation; Stephen Whyman, Head of Debt Capital Markets, EMEA at Fidelity International Ltd (FIL); Sara Hall, Partner at Walkers; and Natasha Benson, COO/CFO at Ownera. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance Fire Chat 'How the obstacles to scalable tokenisation are being cleared', with special guests Andreas Rufflin of BX Digital and Benedikt Schuppli of Obligate. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The major traditional exchanges have adapted well to the migration of transactional activity to other trading platforms, notably by developing their data and post-trade revenues, so it is surprising that they remain indifferent to tokenisation. With some notable exceptions, traditional stock exchanges have shown little interest in the revolutionary potential of issuing, trading and servicing tokens. Explanations for this indifference vary. Some say the existing markets (especially equity trading) are already so efficient that tokenisation is unnecessary. The fact that exchanges which have invested in tokenisation have yet to earn a return, and are now making economies, is not encouraging. If tokenisation ever does take off, add some larger exchanges, they could simply acquire the successful platforms. The long lists of intermediaries that stand between issuers and investors – global brokers, local brokers, clearing houses, securities depositories, payments banks, custodian banks and so on – also have limited incentives to encourage the emergence of peer-to-peer exchanges. So even the leading traditional stock exchange groups are focusing on a narrow range of token opportunities, such as cryptocurrencies and privately managed assets, and leaving potential lavish operational cost savings and new product earnings untouched. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, moderated a discussion of about traditional stock exchanges and tokenisation with Marco Kessler, business head of digital securities at six Digital Exchange SDX, Hirander Misra, chairman and CEO of GMEX Group, Ricardo Correia, a partner in the financial services practice at Bain and Company, Benedikt Schuppli, co-founder and CBDO at Obligate and Miryusup Abdullaev, managing director of the Deutsche Börse Digital Exchange (DBDX). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance Interview with Apex Group founder and CEO Peter Hughes and Head of Digital Assets Bruce Jackson.The Apex Group has grown from an idea in the minds of two people in Bermuda just over 20 years ago to a global fund administration business employing 13,000 people across 112 offices around the world to look after assets under administration worth more than US$1 trillion. Such rapid expansion by acquisition was made possible by the support of major private equity investors – they include Genstar, Carlyle and Mubadala – but Apex is more than a classic roll-up story. The firm has retained its original bias to alternative strategies, but has moved far beyond fund accounting, transfer agency and management company services to embrace capital introductions, depositary and custody services and an Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) ratings and advisory service. But what really distinguishes Apex from other fund administrators is its embrace of new technologies in general and blockchain technologies in particular. It has not only supported several tokenised fund issues but invested in a tokenisation engine (the Luxembourg-based Tokeny) and in the London-based FundAdminChain (which began as a fund tokenisation platform but morphed into an automated investor due diligence checking and on-boarding service). No other fund administrator has shown a comparable level of material commitment to a tokenised future for the funds industry. As Dominic Hobson, Co-founder of Future of Finance, found out when he spoke to Apex Group founder and CEO Peter Hughes and Head of Digital Assets Bruce Jackson, the enthusiasm of the senior management for tokenisation is not about intellectual curiosity but long-term survival and success. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Robert Koller, co-founder and CEO at NowCM, and Jochen Metzger, Global Head of Markets at NowCM.The bond and money markets have emerged, for different reasons, as early targets for transformation through the application of blockchain technology. Although the illiquidity of the corporate bond markets in particular is a tempting target for blockchains and tokenisers, several new ventures have aimed instead to improve the notoriously under-digitalised primary market issuance process. A number, despite the materiality of the opportunity, have failed already. But survival is not the only risen why the stealthier rise of NowCM is of interest. The reasons behind its steady success so far include a focus on solving primary market inefficiencies with accurate data rather than process-transforming technology; a commitment to an open rather than a closed network that attracts other specialist service providers and facilitates unthreatening partnerships with both established debt market networks and other start-ups; a recognition that it is wiser to work with the incumbent sell-side intermediaries rather than against them, not least because the buy-side continues to want them to be involved; a preference for conventional technologies that minimise the cost and complexity of connecting users and delivering services; and, lastly, a number of astute acquisitions that have secured solid revenues as well as valuable technology and useful client relationships. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of the Future of Finance, spoke to Robert Koller, co-founder and CEO at NowCOM, and Jochen Metzger, formerly a senior official at the Bundesbank who is now Global Head of Markets at NowCM, about the origins, products, strategy and growth plans of a business that describes itself as both a “data company” and a ”new era market infrastructure.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Nadine Chakar at DTCC.With the acquisition in October 2023 of Securrency, a FinTech that specialises in the development of blockchain technology for regulated financial institutions, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) signalled the end of the experimental phase of its engagement with digital assets. That phase dated back to at least December 2015, when DTCC joined the Linux Foundation Hyperledger project. That was quickly followed by participation in the US$60 million Series A fundraising by Digital Asset Holdings in January 2016, and publication the same month of a white paper on blockchain that warned of the potential “generational disruptive force” of blockchain. DTCC has maintained its interest in blockchain ever since, notably via the launch in November 2021 of DSM, an infrastructure to support the tokenisation of privately managed assets. But the Securrency acquisition gives the clearing and settlement infrastructure the tools it needs to move beyond narrow asset classes and Proofs of Concept (PoCs) and Pilot Tests and actually build an open tokenisation infrastructure for the whole of the American capital markets: a blockchain platform, a tokenisation engine, a smart contract engine, a digital asset custody service, programmable token capabilities, off-chain storage of ledger data and digital identity information, and a set of tools to ensure assets remain compliant as they travel across the digital asset eco-system. The Securrency acquisition also brought to DTCC Nadine Chakar, a senior and experienced securities services executive with an attested appetite for innovation who had joined the firm as CEO only nine months earlier from State Street, where she was Head of Digital. Her appointment as Global Head of DTCC Digital Assets is a boost for those who believe that the key to unlocking the potential of tokenised assets is open infrastructure. To find out if those hopes are justified, read, listen or watch Future of Finance Co-founder Dominic Hobson interviewing Nadine Chakar. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Jürgen Schaaf, an economic adviser to the European Central Bank (ECB).After Bitcoin first appeared in 2009 extravagant claims were made for its benefits. It would replace fiat currency as the money used by consumers in day-to-day transactions. Bitcoin would hold its value in a way that no fiat currency, being issued by central banks and intermediated by commercial banks, will ever manage. The centralised institutions profiting from the prevailing system of finance would all be disintermediated, giving way to a series of decentralised peer-to-peer networks that had no need of formal structures of trust or explicit measures to protect personal privacy. 15 years on, Bitcoin is a US$1.25 trillion speculative asset, which has proved spectacularly its uselessness as form of money and a means of disintermediation. Yet Bitcoin has remained surprisingly immune to searching criticism, in large part because its cheerleaders in social media and elsewhere have drowned out or ridiculed dissenting voices, and waged a successful (if ironic) campaign to turn Bitcoin into a respectable asset worthy of the attention of regulated banks and savings institutions. The success of these efforts in driving the value of Bitcoin upwards at a compound annual rate of 172 per cent since 2011 has not only made some of those voices extremely rich but made it hard for critics to build a sustained as well as coherent critique of the cryptocurrency. But since he published, in November 2022, “Bitcoin's last stand,” the first of several papers questioning the economic rationale of Bitcoin, Jürgen Schaaf, an economic adviser to the European Central Bank (ECB), has developed exactly that. He spoke to Future of Finance Co-founder Dominic Hobson. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The securities and the fund markets need to be digitally transformed. The profits of the asset and wealth management industries are being squeezed by shrinking fees and rising costs. Tokenisation of both funds and the underlying securities can, properly construed, solve the problem. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of tokenisations of securities and funds are more like securitisations than tokenisations. Like mortgage-backed securities, they are asset-backed. Which means they are not truly digital assets at all but mere derivatives of assets which continue to exist in their traditional form, whether that is physical (as with real estate or precious metals) or digital (an oft-cited paradox is that most securities and funds exist only as digital entries in computer systems already). As a result, the medley of intermediary institutions that has developed over decades to support the traditional funds and securities industries remains undisturbed as well. This is, of course, the attraction of asset-backed tokenisation. It threatens no incumbent business with disintermediation and requires minimal changes to the existing corpus of securities and fund markets laws and regulations. But it is also the problem, because it changes next to nothing. According to SIFMA, the revenues of the global investment banking industry alone took an average of US$92.4 billion a year out of the capital markets between 2018 and 2022. But the exchanges that list securities, the brokers that execute trades on exchanges, the custodians that safekeep securities, the fund accountants that value securities, the transfer agents that maintain registers of holders of securities, the central counterparty clearing houses (CCPs) that intermediate and net trades and the central securities depositories (CSDs) that settle trades all have to be paid as well. So it is not surprising that tokenisation of securities and funds is not taking off – it has yet to be tried seriously. This webinar will explore what true tokenisation is, what it can do for the buy-side and what it might do to as well as for the sell-side, and how to make it happen.What topics will be discussed?What is the difference between asset-backed and genuine tokenisation?What explains the current preference for asset-backed tokenisation?What new products and services does genuine tokenisation make possible?In what ways does genuine tokenisation threaten current intermediaries?What new opportunities does genuine tokenisation create for current intermediaries?Are asset managers, issuers, investors and regulators supportive of change?Do securities and fund laws and regulations have to change to accommodate genuine tokenisation?Does genuine tokenisation require fiat currency in digital form?What technologies will underpin the future of digital asset issuance, trading and servicing?Who or what will make change happen?Who is on the panel?Rajeev Tummala, Head of Digital and Data at HSBC Securities ServicesStefano Dallavalle, Head of Product, Digital Assets at R3Ami Ben-David, Founder and CEO at OwneraRalf Kubli, Board Member at Casper AssociationModerated by Dominic Hobson, Co-Founder at Future of Finance Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has built a formidable presence in the global securities services industry over the 35 years that have elapsed since it signed a contract to build a computer system for the Swiss central securities depository (CSD) back in 1989. Today, TCS owns a dominant share of the CSD technology market, and its TCS Bancs system is widely used by the custodian banks that are the gatekeepers to the CSDs as well. But the company has now moved far beyond the sale of software licences to provide both IT and full operational outsourcing services. Diligenta, its life and pensions outsourcing service in the United Kingdom, now looks after two in five British holders of pension plans and life assurance policies. A business which provides software products, Cloud-based technology and data hosting and processing and end-to-end operational support is not well-described as either a software vendor or a technology consultant, and certainly not as a data vendor, but its combination of businesses does look well-designed to exploit the age of blockchain. Blockchain, after all, is an Internet computing technology that can in theory digitise anything and everything into an executable data object. Accordingly, it can provide a solid foundation for financial markets as well as payments, supply chains, corporate networks, social networks, digital identities, artificial intelligence (AI) and the virtual realities of the Metaverse. Which is why TCS has also developed blockchain capabilities that enable companies to issue, trade, safekeep and service tokenised assets, and move those assets on and off and between blockchain networks. Future of Finance Co-founder Dominic Hobson asked Vivekanand Ramgopal, President, BFSI Products & Platforms, how TCS helps its clients maintain the balance between the need to service existing business, the urge to innovate and the fear of transformation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Tony Mclaughlin, Emerging Payments and Business Development at CitiThe Regulated Liability Network (RLN) embodies an idea of the future of money that, unlike most conceptual novelties in the field, has become more voguish rather than less since it was first unveiled in a white paper of November 2022. In fact, the RLN can lay claim to have pioneered an approach to scaling the tokenisation of assets that has captured the interest of supranationals and central banks. The white paper may have coincided with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) advancing the idea of an “X-C platform” but it appeared months before the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) outlined its notion of a “unified ledger” or “single programmable platform” and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced it was working with four banks on Global Layer One (GL1), an open digital infrastructure to host tokenised financial assets and applications. But it would be a mistake to label the RLN as avant-garde. It is based in a sound understanding of the classic theory of computation and aims unashamedly to preserve fiat currencies and their twin variants of commercial and central bank money as the foundations of the financial systems of the future. Its design for a common settlement infrastructure for tokenised money also bears an uncanny resemblance to the way payments are settled today, in terms of intermediation as well as technique. Which is why RLN might just be adopted widely once banks understand its design. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Tony McLaughlin, Managing Director, Emerging Payments and Business Development at Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions, and one of the 11 industry leaders that contributed to the development of the original idea of the RLN. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Part 4/4A Future of Finance interview with Gilbert Verdian, CEO of QuantIncumbent financial institutions did initially retard progress towards large and liquid digital asset markets, by investing in a discovery process rather than commercial opportunities, but appreciation of the cost savings and the revenue and profit gains available from investing in and trading digital assets is now widespread, as the enthusiasm for spot Bitcoin ETFs showed.The criticism that most tokenisations so far have limited benefits because they are asset-backed rather than digitally native under-estimates the value of bundling and unbundling tokenised assets into new instruments and fails to recognise that tokenisation has yet to impact the global bond and equity markets in a significant way at all.Asset managers are in a powerful position to drive progress towards tokenisation because they have much to gain from reduced costs of investment and increased diversification of returns, and the downward pressure they are experiencing on ad valorem fees mean they also have strong incentives to push the investment banks to offer them alternatives.Policymakers and regulators are also in a powerful position to encourage adoption of tokenised assets by working with the private sector to devise legal and regulatory regimes that encourage the issuance of digital assets and attract institutional investors to purchase them, creating a virtuous circle that catalyses the growth of digital assets everywhere. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Part 3/4A Future of Finance interview with Gilbert Verdian, CEO of QuantInter-operability between blockchain networks, and between blockchain networks and traditional financial markets, is essential to overcome the isolation of digital asset and traditional asset markets and so fuel their liquidity and growth, and the digital finance system must be designed and built from the outset with inter-operability at its core. Proprietary solutions to the inter-operability problem cannot build inter-operability into the new digital finance system from the outset, so institutions in the private and the public sectors must work together to co-design and then co-build standardised infrastructures that enable tokens to be ported seamlessly between networks at the local, regional and global levels. The financial market infrastructures that serve traditional assets at the pre-trade, trade and post-trade levels cannot be replaced overnight but must be integrated into the new digital financial market infrastructures, where they will persist only until the cost of maintaining them exceeds the costs of investing in the more efficient and service-rich digital alternatives. A unified ledger, or single programmable platform, of the kind outlined by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Regulated Liability Network (RLN), will develop in layers as standardised national and regional platforms are built through private-public collaboration and start to inter-operate on a global scale. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset, and Eric Saraniecki, co-founder and head of strategic initiatives at Digital Asset.In October this year, Digital Asset will celebrate the tenth anniversary of its foundation. Under the flamboyant leadership of Blythe Masters, who was CEO from 2015 to 2018, no start-up did more to promote the potential impact of blockchain technology on the capital markets. Over the five years that have passed since she stepped down, Digital Asset has transformed itself from a pioneer of institutional-grade blockchain technology for financial market infrastructures into a provider of tools for building the smart contracts that enable assets to be tokenised, and a sponsor of the public but permissioned Canton Network blockchain network. Above all, it survived unscathed the cancellation of the flagship ASX contract, won in January 2016, to rebuild the post-trade infrastructure of the Australian stock exchange. Though the current strategy can be portrayed as a pivot away from the grand visions of 2016, the company has remained remarkably consistent in its (eponymous) belief that one day all assets will be digital, and that blockchain will provide a secure technological foundation for a network of networks that will encompass tokenised securities, funds, private equity, real estate, privately managed assets, commodities, rights and royalties, and collectibles. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset, and Eric Saraniecki, co-founder and head of strategic initiatives at Digital Asset, about the history of the company, its products, the use-cases it has found and exploited, the thinking and the strategy behind the Canton Network, and the challenges the digital asset industry has still to overcome. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Part 2/2A Future of Finance interview with Gilbert Verdian, CEO of QuantSettlement of digital assets without fiat currency being available on blockchain networks is problematic, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) remain a distant prospect, but commercial banks are increasingly excited by the efficiency savings and service enhancements made possible by the programmability of digital money, including tokenised deposits.Claims that money is already digital ignore the fact that payments require push-and-pull exchanges of data to complete transactions, whereas truly digital forms of money enable the sequence of actions that complete a transaction, such as financial crime checks and the availability of money in an account, to be programmed into the digital money itself.Cryptocurrency will continue to exist as a speculative investment, though institutional investors will favour regulated cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency investment vehicles such as the spot Bitcoin Exchange Traded Funds recently authorised in the United States, and the regulated variety of cryptocurrencies can be expected to drive out the unregulated varieties. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Part 1/1A Future of Finance interview with Gilbert Verdian, CEO of QuantThe time in which regulators observed rather than intervened in digital asset markets is now over, and regulators are starting to work with the private sector to design effective regulations that match the pace of technological development, but progress would be much faster if a single regulator was given responsibility for digital finance.The reliance of traditional finance on national forms of regulation is ill-suited to the genuinely global and highly mobile digital asset markets, as the constant migration of cryptocurrency exchanges in search of accommodating jurisdictions proved, so a major jurisdiction needs to establish a minimum standard all jurisdictions can support. The principal benefit of regulatory sandboxes is not to produce Unicorns or drive the reform of existing regulations but to prove that existing regulations are adequate to the task of regulating digital assets, which is of greater value to institutions that are regulated already than to new market entrants whose businesses test existing regulations. Experience has shown that existing frameworks of law are adaptable to novel conceptions of property such as natively digital assets, but at this nascent stage in the development of the digital asset markets, the flexibility of the law is less important than a clear line between what is acceptable within the law already and what must await the further evolution of the law.Governments can influence the rate of growth of the digital asset markets directly by encouraging equity investment in smaller companies and issuing government bonds in tokenised form, which would have knock-on effects in encouraging atomic settlement using tokenised central or commercial bank money as the cash leg of the transaction. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Stephen Ashurst, CEO of Tokenbridge.Tokenbridge is a software company which has embraced a tokenised future for the mutual funds industry. Its founders, all of which have long experience of the traditional funds industry, believe tokenisation can make funds cheaper to issue and service but – unlike most blockchain-based start-ups in the industry - their vision has less to do with cutting the costs of production and operation and more to do with widening distribution. The blockchain-based system Tokenbridge has built offers issuers of funds (fund managers) and distributors of funds (wealth managers) the software tools to make tokenised funds easier to find, compare and buy through a single app (aggregation) and in forms and combinations that better suit the needs of the investor (personalisation). The company strategy is based on the conviction that using digital technology to transform how funds are distributed is not a nice-to-have. The Boomers that dominate fund ownership today are yielding to a post-Internet generation that expects investment advice, and fund purchase and sales processes and reporting, to be digitised. Delivering this, especially to portfolios of modest value, cannot be done without transformative technology. Yet fund managers and distributors that fail to use technology deliver a full and compelling digital experience, warns Tokenbridge, will enjoy a smaller share of a global marketplace that tokenisation will enlarge massively. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Stephen Ashurst, CEO of Tokenbridge, about how to apply the experience of the past to building a bridge to the future that does not require a revolution today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Christophe Lepitre, CEO at IZNES and Valérie Gilles, CCO at IZNES.IZNES is a marketplace that enables issuers of funds (asset managers) and institutional investors in funds (such as insurance companies and fund distributors) to sell and buy and service funds in tokenised form on a Cloud-based private, permissioned blockchain. To avoid the build-it-and-they-will-come fallacy, IZNES has solidified its relationships with leading insurance and asset management companies by offering them equity stakes in the business. The strategy has obviously worked, because IZNES has already attracted 18 institutional investors and 36 asset management companies and has €18 billion of funds registered on its marketplace, and its platform is supporting both assert-backed and native fund tokens. Because its target audience is institutional, and institutions prefer to deal with regulated entities, IZNES has secured regulatory licences from two French regulators and used these to passport its services into other major European fund jurisdictions, including the two main fund servicing centres of Ireland and Luxembourg. The firm has also concentrated on providing services that alleviate obvious pain points in the funds industry such as entitlement allocation and distribution and especially the onerous on-boarding and regular customer due diligence checks needed to meet Know Your Client (KYC), Anti Money Laundering (AML), Countering the financing of Terrorism (CFT) and sanctions screening obligations. The longer-term plans include the development of a secondary market in funds, initially to support the less-than-liquid infrastructure funds now being encouraged by regulators. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Christoph Lepitre, chief executive officer (CEO), and Valerie Gilles, chief commercial officer (CCO), at IZNES. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 17 November 2023 Christine Lagarde, the President of the European Central Bank (ECB), told a conference of bankers that “a truly European capital market needs consolidated market infrastructures.”[1] European capital markets certainly lack them now. They are a quarter the size of the American capital market yet support three times as many stock exchanges, and 20 times as many post-trade financial market infrastructures. The lack of a European equivalent of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) does not reflect a lack of regulatory effort. A succession of reports and schemes – Codes of Conduct, several pan-European regulations and even an entirely new settlement system run by the ECB (T2S) – dating back nearly a quarter of a century have largely failed to accelerate the consolidation of the capital market infrastructures of Europe. The price of that failure, in a higher cost of capital, a less resilient financial system and lower rates of innovation and economic growth, is more evident than ever in the aftermath of Brexit, amid a steady closing of open markets, and ahead of looming demographic and climate crises. So who and what can meet the challenge set by Christine Lagarde? That is the subject matter of this Future of Finance webinar. For further background on the subject, see the accompanying Future of Finance article, European capital markets are inefficient, so why aren't European CSDs doing more about it? What topics will be discussed?What are the costs of a fragmented post-trade infrastructure in Europe?What explains the continuing settlement inefficiencies of Europe, despite the introduction of T2S?What has prevented the CSDs of Europe consolidating in the past?Is the current ownership structure of European CSDs conducive to market-led consolidation?Can a single programmable platform (a sort of Ethereum for CSDs) achieve the same effects as a single European CSD?What part does blockchain technology have to play in improving the post-trade infrastructure of Europe?Is the EU Pilot Regime a flop and will the UK Digital Securities Sandbox be one too?Will pressure to settle on T+1 accelerate or decelerate change in European post-trade infrastructure?Are there helpful technical solutions (e.g., “atomic” settlement, using AI and predictive analytics help improve settlement rates) short of consolidation?What is the fastest way to a more efficient set of CSD services for the European capital markets – consolidation, cooperation and collaboration, regulatory intervention, market-led competition or technology?Who is on the panel?Dirk Loscher, Member of the Executive Board at Clearstream https://www.linkedin.com/in/dirk-loscher-9220b6248/Chris Richardson, CEO at Percival Software https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-richardson-26842923/Andrea Tranquillini CEO Advisor at EDAA https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreatranquillini/Bill Meenaghan CEO at SSimple https://www.linkedin.com/in/billmeenaghan/Martin Watkins CEO at Montis Group https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinwatkins1/Moderator: 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.

A Future of Finance podcast with Neil Thomas, Chief Commercial Officer of AsiaNext.AsiaNext, a 24/7, Singapore-based institutional-only digital asset trading platform, opened for business in January 2024. Owned by the Swiss stock exchange (SIX) and SBI Holdings of Japan, AsiaNext emphasises its sound governance and regulatory compliance, which its owners and management believe are the keys to attracting institutional money. The new exchange has already secured two operating licences from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and has applied for a third. But easily the most striking ambition of the new exchange is its commitment to a global strategy, in which AsiaNext will form a triad with the Swiss Digital Exchange (SDX, owned by SIX) in Zurich and Osaka Digital Exchange in Japan (where SBI is a major shareholder). To make a reality of this ambition, much depends on the behaviour of others. Technologists must create the tools to facilitate the transfer of digital assets between platforms (interoperability) and central banks must provide the trusted, on-chain fiat currency (CBDCs) to pay for them. But AsiaNext is moulded in the image of its parents and its management does not hesitate to speak of ten-year time horizons as well as the returns that are waiting to be collected on the investment in radical change. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Neil Thomas, Chief Commercial Officer of AsiaNext, about the origins, character and destiny of the first self-consciously global digital asset trading venue. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast will cover these regulatory developments and other issues, all of which are also raised in the second edition of Future of Finance's Digital Asset Custody Guide (DACG2), which can be accessed here. The event will open with a presentation that draws on Future of Finance proprietary data about licences, registrations and certifications secured by digital asset custodians to illustrate the changing structure and geographical compass of the digital asset custody industry – and what it means for the service providers and their customers. This will be followed by a discussion between the online audience and a panel of experts, moderated by Future Finance Co-founder Dominic Hobson.What topics will be discussed?At what pace are regulated custodian banks approaching the digital asset opportunity?How important is custody to the unexpected success of Germany in tokenising and digitising issuance?How large a factor is SAB 121 in deterring the engagement of American custodian banks in digital asset custody?What does the proposed “safeguarding rule” introduced by revisions to the 1940 Investment Advisers Act mean for custodian banks?What do registrations to provide custody services tell us about the evolving structure of the industry?Why is it so hard to obtain a licence to provide custody services?Why are digital asset custodians so enthusiastic about professional certifications?Are custody markets, regulators and providers aligned on the ultimate destination?PanellistsTariq Rasheed, Partner at Reed Smith https://www.linkedin.com/in/tariq-zafar-rasheed-81b22018/Thilo Derenbach Head of Sales & Business Development Digital Securities Services at Clearstream https://www.linkedin.com/in/thilo-derenbach-2102031/Marius Lunding Smith Director Strategy and Growth at Finoa https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariuslundingsmith/Mark Mayerfeld Chief Revenue Officer at GK8 https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mayerfeld-0566874/Moderator: Dominic Hobson, Co-Founder of Future of Finance https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominic-hobson-49b8222/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Max Heinzle, CEO of 21X21X is a Frankfurt-headquartered token issuance, trading and settlement platform built on blockchain technology, and underpinned by a group of long-term investors, that expects to be the first to receive a licence to operate under the EU DLT Pilot Regime that allows operators of market infrastructures to test blockchain technology in the issuance, trading and settlement of tokenised financial instruments. The boldness of the company strategy is evident in its preference for a public, non-permissioned blockchain network, and the fullness of its commitment to automating as many functions as possible by the use of smart contracts. That said, the founders of 21X are astute enough to recognise that it will be easier to attract issuers and investors by working with rather than against the incumbent institutions that currently own those relationships, and within the regulatory frameworks that institutions prefer. They are confident that the shareholders of 21X support their long-term strategy and that the regulators would like to see the business succeed and thrive within the parameters set by investor protection and financial stability. Interestingly, 21X has also chosen Germany, the surprising market leader in digital asset market innovation in Europe, as its initial base of operations. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Max Heinzle, CEO of 21x, about where the company came from, where its I now, and where it intends to be in five years' time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A year and a half may have elapsed since the last central bank digital currency (CBDC) was issued. But the work at and by central banks, banks, supranational organisations and technology vendors has continued. The accompanying output of policy statements, academic papers, discussion documents and accounts of experiments is a vast but rich source of experience and information. Which is why a team at R3, a leading force in the digitisation of financial markets and a participant in multiple CBDC projects, embarked on a review of the literature that has accumulated about CBDCs. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Alisa DiCaprio, the Chief Economist at R3 who lead the investigation, about what the review unveiled about how CBDCs are being designed, issued and operated, and learned what CBDC designers everywhere still lack: a trove of empirical data about the impact of CBDCs on the behaviour of money, markets and especially consumers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.