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 en...
May 30, 2023•1 hr 44 min•Season 1Ep. 139
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. D...
May 24, 2023•46 min•Season 1Ep. 138
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 mo...
May 24, 2023•44 min•Season 1Ep. 137
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...
Mar 24, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 136
There is now widespread acceptance that digital assets are going to co-exist alongside traditional assets for a long time. That implies that issuers and investors will need a market infrastructure that renders issuers indifferent as to whether a source of liquidity is digital or traditional and investors indifferent as to whether an exposure is available in digital form or in traditional form. Both sides of the market just need something that works efficiently at low cost with minimal disruption...
Mar 16, 2023•43 min•Season 1Ep. 135
The decision by regulators to bring bank-issued Stablecoins within the scope of regulation is helping to fashion a vision of the future of money in which central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) play a role not unlike the one existing forms of central bank money play in the money markets of today: underpinning innovation and experimentation in different forms of money and different ways of making payments by both banks and non-banks without putting monetary, financial and operational stability at...
Feb 06, 2023•54 min•Season 1Ep. 134
Privately managed assets have become the default choice for tokenisation enthusiasts. The reasoning behind their choice is hard to fault. The advertised benefits of tokenisation apply a fortiori to the asset class. Privately managed assets – especially hedge funds and real estate, but also equity issuers that might previously have used the private placement or crowd-funding markets to raise capital – account for a disproportionate share of token issues so far. But are the enthusiasts and the pio...
Jan 20, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 133
Tokenisation may be making limited headway in the conventional securities markets but it is attracting considerable interest in less familiar asset classes. 360X, the digital assets marketplace backed by Deutsche Börse and Commerzbank, aims to tokenise rights in expert-verified and high-quality art, music and (in cooperation with Tectrex) real estate assets. 360X Music, which provides an infrastructure for structuring deals, issuing tokens and promoting them to investors, has already issued secu...
Jan 18, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 132
Securities are issued into CSDs. The integrity of every issue of securities is safeguarded by CSDs. Ownership of securities is recorded by CSDs. Transactions in securities are settled by CSDs. Securities are serviced by CSDs. So, if it happens, tokenisation will either disrupt or transform or eliminate these functions. It is therefore both an existential threat and an exciting opportunity for CSDs. What tokenisation is not is something that CSDs can afford to ignore. Attendees will hear speakers...
Jan 13, 2023•1 hr 27 min•Season 1Ep. 131
Digital asset enthusiasts are finding that neither issuers nor investors are ready or able yet to let go of high levels of intermediation. Historically, keeping track of investors is the responsibility of the registrar who, in a blockchain-based future is made redundant by a digital ledger that is updated automatically every time an asset changes ownership. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have rarely made use of a third-party registrar anyway, preferring to keep their register and cap ...
Jan 13, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 130
Four years have elapsed since the Swiss stock exchange (SIX) took the bold decision in 2018 to respond to the challenge tokenisation has issued to traditional securities exchanges. SIX opted to build alongside its existing infrastructure an entirely new, blockchain-based trading, settlement and custody platform for digital assets. In September 2021 the SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) received its operating licence from the Swiss regulator, the Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) - itself n...
Jan 06, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 129
Tokenised funds exist already in the United States and Singapore. Asset managers are not only issuing tokenised funds but backing projects whose ambition is to facilitate the large-scale tokenisation of shares in mutual funds. What are the benefits they see? In this podcast, the coming tokenisation of the mutual funds industry will be discussed, in terms of the incentives to change, the techniques employed and the timetable by which it will proceed. Whenever and however it happens, it will be a ...
Dec 12, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 128
Safe custody is the service that will unlock corporate issuance and institutional investing in the securities, asset-backed, non-fungible and fund token markets. While there is widespread recognition that regulation of digital asset custodians would accelerate progress, regulators around the world have so far reached consensus on combating financial crime only. Even that is proceeding slowly and patchily, but regulation of digital asset custodians and digital asset custody risks is proceeding mo...
Dec 09, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 127
The global Pandemic tested established operational resilience procedures in unexpected ways. It made redundant some conventional solutions, accelerated the digitisation and digitalisation that regulators were already fretting about, and prompted a concerted push by regulators around the world for financial institutions to enhance their operational resilience to the novel and rapidly mutating threats created by digital technology. Yet the ability of regulators to devise sensible measures and even...
Nov 23, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 126
One major frustration for digital asset markets enthusiasts is the stubborn refusal of security token issuance to, in the famous phrase of Walt Rostow, take off into self-sustaining growth. After all, the benefits seem plain enough, and cutting the all-important cost of capital is chief among them. So what is holding issuers back? Part of the answer lies in the fact that the natural pioneers of Security Token Offerings (STOs) are smaller companies, and what looks like a big saving in issuance co...
Nov 23, 2022•57 min•Season 1Ep. 125
The slow and steady convergence of blockchain-based finance and traditional financial markets is now a widely accepted prognosis. True, the implosion of values on the cryptocurrency and decentralised finance (DeFi) markets since the autumn of 2021 has made convergence seem the obvious path in the future. But the acceptance of this possibility by all but the most unreconstructed voices at either end of the spectrum owes much to the efforts of a small number of early blockchain pioneers and enthus...
Oct 21, 2022•57 min•Season 1Ep. 124
Traders active in the cryptocurrency and decentralised finance (DeFi) markets have long found the operational infrastructure of the industry frustrating. Settlement of trades is slow and expensive. Worse, settlement requires them to be fully funded. To alleviate the costs and complexity, the obvious solution is to create closed circles of trustworthy counterparts. Several providers now offer services along these lines but the San Francisco-based Bosonic Network goes further. Bosonic offers a ser...
Oct 21, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 123
A presentation by Dr Ian Hunt on his recently published paper, Digital Issuance - An Optimal Model for Digital Assets and Transactions, was followed by a discussion with an expert panel and the members of an invited audience, moderated by Future of Finance co-founder Dominic Hobson. Margin pressure exerted by institutional investors and passive investing means asset managers must cut costs but the methods used over the last 30 years – computerisation, outsourcing and offshoring – are no longer s...
Oct 06, 2022•41 min•Ep. 122
According to Willis Re, there are around 3,000 self-proclaimed InsurTechs at work in the world today. The age and size and funding and technologies of InsurTechs is so various, and the range of activities they pursue so immense, that it is difficult to comprehend which innovations are working and which are not. The use of video and telemetrics, such as the admission of photographic evidence and sensors in motor insurance, attract headlines. But the sales and the funding tend to go to larger and ...
Sep 16, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 121
The future of blockchain now hinges more than ever on moving beyond crypto-currencies to create the universe of decentralised products and services that almost all characterisations of Web 3.0 endorse. These products and services will make use of the smart contracts pioneered by the entrepreneurs that created the Decentralised Finance (DeFi) and Non-Fungible Token (NFT) markets and which are now building the security token and Metaverse markets as well. The success of products and services built...
Sep 01, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 120
Liquidity in privately managed assets is hampered by a lack of reliable and timely data about asset values. If value is hard to discern, privately managed assets are more difficult to buy and sell, harder to use as collateral and suffer from a less favourable accounting treatment. It is also difficult to develop secondary markets in which the assets can be traded. A distributed technology such as blockchain is well-adjusted to capturing, validating and then distributing data scattered across mul...
Aug 30, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 119
SDX, the digital arm of the Swiss stock exchange, has launched an income-generating crypto-currency staking service for clients of the private banks in Switzerland. Owned and operated by a separate entity within the group, the Cloud-based service enables holders of crypto-currencies to collect a yield on their portfolios by staking their assets to claim the rewards for validating or attesting blocks of transactions. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, asked Alex Smith, Crypto Produc...
Aug 30, 2022•33 min•Season 1Ep. 118
FQX is a blockchain-based issuance platform for tokenised debt. Founded in Zurich in 2019, the start-up has invested as much time and money in the legalities as the technology and can now offer issuers near-certainty over the status of their security token offerings in legal and regulatory terms across six jurisdictions. The initial focus is on short-term corporate debt, with the aim of normalising the digital registration, issuance, transfer and trading of generic eNote tokens before expanding ...
Aug 26, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 117
Concordium is a Layer 1, Proof-of-Stake blockchain with its own cryptocurrency. So far, so normal. But Concordium also has a fascinating twist: it incorporates digital identification functionality at the level of the protocol. If predictions of the eventual universality of digital identity are even half-fulfilled, this feature will give Concordium an edge over other Layer 1 blockchains as the digital economy makes use of more efficient, privacy-protecting methods of customer due diligence. The c...
Aug 24, 2022•55 min•Season 1Ep. 116
10xbanking is not your average provider of Cloud-based banking Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The company is the brainchild of former Barclays Group CEO Antony Jenkins, who has since leaving the British bank in 2015 embraced the idea of transforming the industry by full digitisation of its infrastructure and operating platforms. 10x has raised more than $252 million to its Series C in June last year, giving it the capital backing (and in some cases the business) of BlackRock, J. P. Morgan Chase, ...
Aug 12, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 115
The peer-to-peer system of cash outlined by Satoshi Nakamoto in his famous paper of October 2008 did not mention regulators or regulations. But its ambition of dispensing with trusted third parties did mean jettisoning regulated financial institutions. Nearly 14 years on, only the irreconcilable libertarian wing of the Blockchain industry still considers regulation of cryptocurrencies to be unthinkable. Major cryptocurrency intermediaries are getting regulated already. Two of the major cryptocur...
Jul 18, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 114
A Future of Finance Webinar that investigates whether the adoption and impact of Blockchain could be accelerated by pursuing an infrastructural strategy that lowers the cost of adoption, recovers the openness of the early Internet and facilitates inter-operability between different networks. A major economic mystery is why a general-purpose technology such as digital computing has not transformed productivity. After all, the marginal cost of producing further copies of software is effectively ze...
Jul 08, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 113
A Future of Finance interview with Thomas von Hohenhau and Marcel Fleisch from V Bank. Liechtenstein is one financial jurisdiction which has embraced the blockchain enthusiastically. It has since January 2020 had in place comprehensive legislation covering all aspects of tokenisation in the shape of the Token and Trustworthy Technologies Service Provider Act (TVTG). The Act is, says VP Bank, one of the factors that has made possible its own rapidly developing asset tokenisation service. The Lich...
Jun 29, 2022•43 min•Season 1Ep. 112
Safe custody is the crucial service for crypto-currency investors. The theft, loss or destruction of the unique private keys to the digital wallets in which cryptocurrencies are held is irreversible and – unlike conventional cash deposits - they are not insured by any commercial provider or guaranteed by any government or government agency. Data analytics firm Chainalysis estimates that a fifth of all Bitcoins ever mined (or somewhere between 2.78 and 3.79 million of them, worth over US$200 bill...
Jun 28, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 111
Cross-border payments are, in the now familiar mantra of the G20, slow, expensive, opaque and inaccessible. This matters because, despite a slowdown in the rate of growth of world trade, cross-border payments are becoming more important, not less. Remittances and e-commerce are more than making up for any shortfalls in exchanges of physical goods. Consultants BCG predict the value of cross-border payments will increase from US$150 trillion in 2017 to US$250 trillion by 2027 – a two thirds increa...
Jun 28, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 110
