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 mar...
Jun 18, 2024•1 hr 28 min•Season 1Ep. 169
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 particip...
Jun 04, 2024•52 min•Season 1Ep. 168
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 fin...
May 20, 2024•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 167
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 tru...
May 17, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 166
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 licen...
May 17, 2024•45 min•Season 1Ep. 165
A Future of Finance interview with Tony Mclaughlin, Emerging Payments and Business Development at Citi The 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 ba...
May 01, 2024•1 hr 34 min•Season 1Ep. 164
Part 4/4 A Future of Finance interview with Gilbert Verdian, CEO of Quant Incumbent 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...
Apr 16, 2024•17 min•Season 1Ep. 163
Part 3/4 A Future of Finance interview with Gilbert Verdian, CEO of Quant Inter-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-op...
Apr 08, 2024•15 min•Season 1Ep. 162
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 d...
Apr 05, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 161
Part 2/2 A Future of Finance interview with Gilbert Verdian, CEO of Quant Settlement 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 ...
Apr 05, 2024•13 min•Season 1Ep. 160
Part 1/1 A Future of Finance interview with Gilbert Verdian, CEO of Quant The 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 t...
Mar 25, 2024•21 min•Season 1Ep. 159
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 distri...
Mar 15, 2024•52 min•Season 1Ep. 158
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 com...
Mar 15, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 157
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 Co...
Feb 23, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 156
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 Mo...
Feb 07, 2024•43 min•Season 1Ep. 155
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...
Jan 25, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 154
A Future of Finance interview with Max Heinzle, CEO of 21X 21X 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 stra...
Jan 24, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 153
A Future of Finance interview with Nicola Plain, CEO of Aktionariat. Success in tokenising equity is unusual. Most issues of tokens are asset-backed versions of existing bonds or fund shares. So the fact that Zurich-based token platform Aktionariat has succeeded in attracting a variety of small company issuers is a considerable achievement. The goal of the firm is to help start-ups and SMEs, initially in Switzerland but eventually around the world, raise equity capital from third parties at low ...
Dec 20, 2023•50 min•Season 1Ep. 152
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 pr...
Dec 18, 2023•27 min•Season 1Ep. 151
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 ...
Dec 01, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 150
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...
Nov 20, 2023•54 min•Season 1Ep. 149
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 interm...
Nov 06, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 148
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 acros...
Oct 16, 2023•49 min•Season 1Ep. 147
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 techn...
Oct 05, 2023•44 min•Season 1Ep. 146
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 Gar...
Sep 20, 2023•33 min•Season 1Ep. 145
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 ...
Aug 09, 2023•56 min•Season 1Ep. 144
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 creati...
Jul 13, 2023•56 min•Season 1Ep. 143
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...
Jul 13, 2023•49 min•Season 1Ep. 142
Download the Future of Finance Stablecoins Paper Now Regulated 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 stra...
Jun 23, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 141
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 ...
Jun 21, 2023•50 min•Season 1Ep. 140
