If you have ever wondered how the global payments industry has made some people very rich indeed, read The Payoff, the new book by former SWIFT CEO Gottfried Leibbrandt and former SWIFT Head of Corporate Affairs Natasha de Terán, published on 1 July. The authors show that the payments industry imposes a massive tax on all forms of economic activity, but for once the villains are not the banks, whose work in managing counterparty, settlement and liquidity risk they consider to be more than useful...
Jun 26, 2021•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 50
Many factors inhibit institutional issuers and investors from adopting security tokens as readily as some institutions have taken to crypto-currencies. But an asset class in need of tokenization - privately managed assets - has been identified and an institutional grade infrastructure is being built to welcome institutional investors. Alex Kech, the CEO of the Singapore-based cryptocurrency and digital asset custodian Onchain Custodian, has drawn on 22 years in the securities services industry w...
Jun 24, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 49
Crypto-currency trading provides returns commensurate with the volatility of the asset class, but not many people have subjected the characteristics of the investment to formal analysis. One person who has is Dr Martin Angerer, Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of Liechtenstein in Vaduz. He not only teaches modules in Financial Technology and the Basics of Blockchain, and researches crypto-currencies and tokenization, but advises crypto-currency investment funds. Dr Angerer is als...
Jun 21, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 48
The central bank that runs the major global reserve currency has largely resisted the temptation to join the increasingly animated debate about central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). But this summer will see the publication by the Federal Reserve of a major consultation paper on making the US dollar available as a CBDC. The peculiar challenges of turning the US Dollar into a CBDC is one of the topics Future of Finance co-founder Dominic Hobson raised with Jim Cunha, an SVP at the Boston Fed wh...
Jun 20, 2021•51 min•Season 1Ep. 47
Questions posed from the October 2020 discussion and will provide the framework for the June 2021 discussion: 1. How can digital technology help trade finance restore lost capacity? 2. What can regulators do to encourage digitisation? 3. What needs to be standardised in digital finance? 4. How can peripheral parts of the industry best be digitised? 5. Will the various digitisation initiatives in trade finance be consolidated by market forces alone? 6. What are the sources of data in trade financ...
Jun 17, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 46
The custodian banks and central securities depositories (CSDs) that make up the global securities services industry are understandably intrigued by institutional investment in crypto-currencies, disintermediating experiments in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) market and the looming possibility of exponential growth in security tokens. Each of these developments is rich in promise, but also threat, and one person who knows how the custodians and CSDs are responding is Vivekanand Ramgopal. That i...
Jun 11, 2021•48 min•Season 1Ep. 45
The principality of Liechtenstein provides the most welcoming environment on the planet for the entrepreneurs of the token economy. Thomas Nägele, managing partner at the Nägele law firm in Vaduz and a software developer as well as a lawyer, was a member of the government working party that drafted the Liechtenstein Trusted Technology Law (TVTG) or Blockchain Act. He spoke to Future of Finance founder Dominic Hobson about the difficulties of capturing novel, technology-based concepts in law and ...
Jun 10, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 44
Liechtenstein was the first jurisdiction in the world to pass a comprehensive law on tokenization. When the Token and Trustworthy Technology Service Provider Act (TVTG) became law on 1 January 2020, it became possible for issuers to tokenize any asset that exists in the physical world - from real estate, through precious metals and collectibles, to securities such as equities and bonds – with the comfort of legal certainty. Dr Thomas Dünser, director of the office of financial innovation of the ...
Jun 03, 2021•37 min•Season 1Ep. 43
Despite their importance, size and liquidity the global FX markets have remained largely immune to the digital technology revolution. The reasons for this include their global scale, amorphous and fragmented structure and lack of an over-arching regulatory framework, but the principal cause of the lack of innovation is the domination of the FX markets by a small coterie of large global banks. Even the FX services for consumers developed by household name FinTechs have done little more than reduc...
May 25, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 42
On the face of it, wealth managers ought to be full of confidence. An ageing population is about to bequeath its accumulated wealth to a younger generation still at work. The tax system is designed to encourage saving but also sufficiently complex to create the appetite for technical advice. Digital technology is cutting the cost of acquiring and servicing customers. Stock markets buoyed by extraordinary monetary policies mean revenues based on ad valorem fees increase effortlessly. Capital requ...
May 20, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 41
Pension fund trustees in the United Kingdom are now under a fiduciary obligation to manage environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks on behalf of the members of the fund. This is not an easy duty to fulfil. That is partly because pension fund trustees cannot simply choose what they believe to be right in terms of ESG. They must ensure the fund has sufficient assets to pay the promised pensions (in defined benefit, or DB, schemes) or maximise the value of the pension portfolio of the membe...
May 18, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 40
Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are happening. On the last day of March 2021, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB) became the first central bank in the world to launch a retail CBDC in a currency union. Now being piloted in four of the member states of the currency union, DCash is being used by consumers and corporates in their day-to-day business. Simon Chantry, chief business development officer at Bitt, the FinTech company which helped the ECCB develop its DCash CBDC, talked to D...
May 13, 2021•47 min•Season 1Ep. 39
What would happen if we could identify and find and grant access to individual bits of data on the Internet as easily as we can reach people and companies through their internet addresses? What would happen if machine learning algorithms could be trained on data sets wherever they were? And what if we could do both these things without breaching privacy or confidentiality? We would have the power to create digital marketplaces in virtually anything, enable governments, companies and people to wo...
May 13, 2021•42 min•Season 1Ep. 38
It is not surprising that RegTech attracted so much money and so many entrepreneurs as the Fintech start-up boom took off from 2012. Banks, asset managers and insurers were hit by successive waves of regulation in the long aftermath of the great financial crisis of 2007-08, and automation of transaction monitoring and reporting, KYC, AML, CFT and sanctions screening checks, data protection, mis-selling risk, cyber-security and even operational resilience was an easy sell. A future in which regul...
May 13, 2021•32 min•Season 1Ep. 37
The global pandemic has left no aspect of life untouched, and FinTech investing is no exception. Jan Arp, founding managing partner at Montreal-based Holt Accelerator, the leading early stage FinTech investor in Canada, told Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, that although the pandemic has reduced appetite for early-stage risk, investors have not lost their enthusiasm for the sector. The health crisis is accelerating the digitisation of financial services, and interest in fraud-bus...
May 11, 2021•13 min•Season 1Ep. 36
A Future of Finance Case studies: an interview with Matt Addison and Lucy Mullins from StepLadder StepLadder is a fintech start-up currently embarked on a crowd-funding campaign to fuel its growth as a peer-to-peer borrowing and lending platform for first-time buyers. The company is currently growing its membership by 13 per cent a month and already planning to extend its techniques and technology beyond the housing market. Join the founders at our Future of Finance Case Study at 14.00 London ti...
May 06, 2021•59 min•Season 1Ep. 35
In late March 2021 a path to liquidity and growth opened in the security token markets. The Private Markets Digitization Steering Group (PMDSG), a group of banks, financial market infrastructures, technology vendors and FinTechs formed under the umbrella of Global Digital Finance in the spring of 2020 went public with a specification that will make inter-operable blockchain networks a reality for the first time. FINP2P is a protocol that allows investors to execute token trades on one network an...
May 06, 2021•48 min•Season 1Ep. 34
Crypto-currencies are already an established asset class in the wealth management industry. A number of adventurous wealth managers and private banks have developed crypto-currency brokerage and custody services for high net worth and ultra-high net worth clients. The decision in November 2020 by Ruffer Investment Management to invest £550 million in Bitcoin as a hedge against unstable monetary conditions marked a further step in the steady march to respectability of leading crypto-currencies. T...
Apr 27, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 33
RegTech is one of the more predictable targets of the FinTechs. The sheer volume of additional regulation imposed on the financial services industry after the financial crisis of 2007-08 demanded automation. Not just to contain the costs of data collection and reporting but to mitigate the risk of compliance failures leading to fines and reputational damage as well. By 2018, a decade after the acute phase of the crisis, 11 major global banks alone had paid US$216 billion in fines for various bre...
Apr 22, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 32
Peer-to-peer platforms are one of the many promises of the blockchain age. More than one has emerged in the giant foreign exchange (FX) markets, as entrepreneurs look to wean institutional and corporate users of the FX markets off their habit of paying too much to banks by netting buy-side trades before going to market. But FX HedgePool, founded by former State Street and BBH currency management veteran Jay Moore, has a specific focus: the predictable monthly and quarterly currency hedging activ...
Apr 17, 2021•39 min•Season 1Ep. 31
Trade documentation and trade finance are notoriously fragmented, manual and poorly digitised. So it is not surprising that Tradeshift, a San Francisco headquartered supply chain digitisation company, has expanded rapidly since its origins in Copenhagen in 2010. As it solved one set of data flows it grew naturally into the adjacent areas and is now a multi-faceted provider of a B2B marketplace, a transaction management platform, and a provider of both payments services and financing. Its ambitio...
Apr 16, 2021•41 min•Season 1Ep. 30
Artificial intelligence (AI) is not yet what its pioneers imagined or what its detractors fear. At the moment it is no more than a branch of computational statistics, which looks for correlations in large vats of digital data through brute force processing guided by algorithms. That it is producing useful findings and outputs is not in question. Most of the apps we use would not exist without it. But at times it feels as if only Ray Kurzweil is keeping alive the dream of building an artificial m...
Apr 16, 2021•38 min•Season 1Ep. 29
The banking industry in the United Kingdom is so consolidated that it is not surprising the Treasury and the Bank of England identified competition as the most urgent need in the wake of the great financial crisis of 2007-08. Metrobank has had a banking licence for more than decade now. Monzo (2015) and Starling Bank (2017) are the best recognised followers and fellow banking unicorn Revolut (2015) finally applied for a banking licence in January 2021. If the multifarious payments and other apps...
Apr 15, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 28
The investments in Bitcoin by Ruffer and MassMutual may have caught the headlines, but crypto-currencies are becoming a tool for corporate treasurers to manage their liabilities as well as a source of capital growth for asset managers. Near-zero to negative interest rates and repeated central bank interventions are encouraging a more adventurous approach in the corporate as well as the retail markets. Whether this will end well cannot be known, but treasurers certainly need safe ways to trade an...
Apr 15, 2021•33 min•Season 1Ep. 27
Security tokens are coming. In fact, they are here already, and have been for a while. Though most of the security token offerings (STOs) in the last three years were hard to distinguish from Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), several corporates and banks (Banco Santander, Bank of China, BBV, Daimler, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale) have tokenised bonds or loans on public as well as private blockchain networks. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Apr 13, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 26
The blockchain era has spawned a great deal of innovation, but its most lasting impact might well lie in the fact it forced us to think more imaginatively about data. A decade ago, every business wanted to be the next Facebook or Google, by selling its data to third parties. Today, the coming businesses are those which have grasped that data naturally belongs not to corporations but to consumers because, once consumers wake up to that fact, a lot of apparently successful businesses are going to ...
Apr 13, 2021•18 min•Season 1Ep. 25
One reason institutional money is now being invested in crypto-currencies is that it is safe to do so. Fireblocks, the provider of an institutional-grade safe custody and settlement platform for digital assets, can take a good measure of the credit for what is happening. Dominic Hobson spoke to Michael Shaulov, CEO and co-founder of the firm, as it completed a US$133 million Series C fund-raising that also saw giant global custodian BNY Mellon take a strategic stake in Fireblocks. Hosted on Acas...
Apr 10, 2021•33 min•Season 1Ep. 24
Central securities depositories (CSDs) were imposed by regulators in the 1990s to solve the securities settlement problems of the 1980s. They have succeeded admirably in that task but so far only a handful have sought to move decisively beyond it and embrace the new opportunities created by the tokenisation of financial assets on blockchain-based networks. Instead, the majority of CSDs have appealed to their origins in the minds of central bankers and securities market regulators of a generation...
Apr 08, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 23
As blockchain technology emerges from the Trough of Disillusionment (© Gartner) and ascends the Slope of Enlightenment (© Gartner) the original promise of what it can deliver once it reaches the Plateau of Productivity (© Gartner) is being rediscovered. Capexmove, a London-based business applying blockchain initially to the debt markets, emphasises the savings in external and internal reconciliation, internal controls, internal audit and regulatory compliance as the various parties start to work...
Apr 05, 2021•29 min•Season 1Ep. 22
Personal lines insurance is a byword for low levels of customer satisfaction, and none attracts less enthusiasm from buyers than motor insurance. The scope to cut prices through automation and improve customer service by moving away from form-filling and call centre queues, is correspondingly high. Peppercorn Insurance is a start-up that aims to cut motor insurance premiums and lift service levels by using artificially intelligent (AI) machines as digital agents to sell and change insurance poli...
Apr 03, 2021•47 min•Season 1Ep. 21
