Where Finance Finds Its Future

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 bl...

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 mone...

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...

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 h...

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-...

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 financi...

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 att...

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...

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 i...

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, initi...

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 a...

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 o...

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 Unite...

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...

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 e...

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 resilienc...

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...

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...

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...

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 fi...

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 surviv...

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 r...

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, unaffecte...

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 an...

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,...