Where Finance Finds Its Future

Nivaura was a blockchain pioneer in London, working with banks, stock exchanges, financial market infrastructures and law firms on a string of high-profile regulatory sandbox projects that proved blockchain technology could support private placements, structured products, bonds, crypto-currency-backed bonds and equity settlements, even within the existing regulatory regime.  The company is no...

Custody, long the poor relation of the traditional securities industry, has emerged as the foundation of the digitalization of the capital markets.  That is because it is confidence in the safekeeping of the private keys that unlock ownership of crypto-currencies and security tokens that will determine the level of institutional investment in both. Polysign subsidiary Standard Custody & T...

Future of Finance Co-founder Dominic Hobson spoke to Revolution Populi CEO Rob Rosenthal about giving consumers the choice, what they will choose and how digital entrepreneurs can create the apps to change the balance of power in data ownership and control. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Issuers, asset managers and investors are under mounting pressure to report how their investments comply with a range of environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. The principal difficulty they face is obtaining data reliable and comparable enough to make meaningful judgments about the companies and the securities they issue. Nobody understands that challenge better than Tim Mohin, now E...

Like insurance and trade finance, international art is a large and valuable market bedevilled by extended chains of intermediaries, excessive levels of fraud and hefty transaction costs. And, like those other markets, art is ripe for transformation by the application of digital technology and techniques to the identification of assets and counterparties and the delivery of objects against payment....

No market has defied attempts to reconstruct it quite as deftly as foreign exchange (FX). The US$6.6 trillion a day market provides a handsome living for a great many people, despite a succession of embarrassing scandals and the publication by central banks of a global Code of Conduct designed to prevent them. FX has more than survived the disappearance of 19 national currencies into the euro and...

1transfer describes itself as the “first transfer agent for the digital world,” by which the founders mean the emerging universe of security tokens. Though it is a consortium venture embracing seven firms in broker-dealing, automated trading, crypto-currency and FinTech, 1transfer is very obviously the brainchild of Houston-headquartered Entoro. The entire raison d’etre of the investment bank is t...

1. Will a wallet-based system replace an account-based system? 2. How can privacy best concerns be addressed? 3. What will the impact of CBDCs be on Stablecoins, crypto-currencies and digital assets more generally? 4. What can be programmed into a CBDC by (a) central banks and (b) private commercial banks? 5. What are the use-cases for a CBDC? 6. How can CBDCs best made inter-operable across natio...

HQLAx is a properly funded start-up using the R3 Corda variant of blockchain technology to improve the ability of banks to mobilise eligible collateral, wherever it is, by tokenising assets while leaving them exactly where they are. Users expect the service to yield massive benefits in capital and liquidity savings as well as lower operational costs, but the stated aim of the venture - “frictionle...

The UK residential property market is an active one, supporting more than 100,000 transactions a month. But it is also notoriously slow, complicated, inefficient and expensive, with multiple intermediaries extracting transaction costs - guaranteeing anybody who offers to digitise the process a warm welcome from house-buyers and sellers. Counter-intuitively, all those intermediaries - estate a...

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 bank...

Back in the blockchain heyday of 2016-18 there was no shortage of schemes to apply the technology to primary market issuance, bond market trading, and post-trade settlement and financing. Some of the ideas of that burst of creativity are now coming to market. – Bond issuance on to distributed networks – The on-chain trading of bonds between market participants – The financing of bond market transa...

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 bank...

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 di...

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...

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...

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 t...

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...

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 fou...

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...

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...

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 extrao...

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 pensi...

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 d...

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...