Where Finance Finds Its Future

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.