Digital Money

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 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.

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. 

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 and even safer ways to custody the assets, and the conventional banking industry is not rushing to provide them. Rob Gaskell, partner at Appold, the London-based emerging technology advisory and investment company, shared with Dominic Hobson his view of the risks and opportunities.

Programmable money is one of the technologies to have emerged from blockchain. In fact, its origins in the trustless promise of primitive blockchain are not hard to discern. It is, in essence, tokenised cash controlled by a smart contract rather than a bank or central bank.

A SUMMARY AND FULL REVIEW OF THE DISCUSSION AT THE WEBINAR ON 16 JANUARY 2021

A FUTURE OF FINANCE WEBINAR WITH BANKS, CENTRAL BANKS, TECHNOLOGISTS IN BLOCKCHAIN AND PAYMENTS, AND REGULATORS

Tuesday February 9 2021, 14.00 - 15.00 UK time

Interview with Loretta Joseph, a Fintech Advisor and Policy Influencer based in Mauritius on Programmable Money and Dominic Hobson, Co-Founder of Future of Finance on the concept of the tokenisation of money and how programmable money differs from traditional money.

Daniel Eidan is solutions architect and global CBDC and payments lead at R3, the distributed ledger technology firm. A panellist in our recent webinar on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), he monitors the rapidly evolving field of CBDCs for R3, which has published a white paper on the subject and formed a CBDC working group. Dominic Hobson asked Daniel about the drivers behind CBDCs, the current state of CBDC development, the different types of CBDC that are emerging and the potential use-cases for CBDCs.

A SUMMARY AND FULL REVIEW OF THE DISCUSSION AT THE WEBINAR ON 7 JULY 2020 PART I

The main reason that central banks are cautious about issuing central bank digital currencies is that they threaten to undermine the source of funding of the commercial banks, and therefore their ability to lend. It is hard to see how this risk can be avoided.

With virtually every central bank on the planet investigating the risks and benefits of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) it is easy to lose sight of the differences between their approaches. The Banque de France, in keeping with its longstanding suspicion of market-led innovation, is trying to control the pace of the digital currency revolution.