Where Finance Finds Its Future

On 13 March 2025 Future of Finance hosted a one-day event at the offices of ReedSmith in London. Entitled Digital asset exchanges: Will tokenisation be the nemesis of exchanges or the re-making of them?, the event attracted more than 200 registrants from stock exchanges, trading venues, digital asset exchanges, fund administrators, central securities depositories, central counterparty clearing houses, technology vendors, data vendors, consultants, custodians, asset managers, wealth managers, banks, brokers, insurers, payments service providers, law firms, venture capital funds, cryptocurrency firms, blockchain platforms and academia. This is an account of what they and the panellists contributed to the five sessions that day, both live and in the multiple-choice questionnaire they completed in advance, the results of which are also published here.Panellists: Benjamin Dean, Director of Digital Assets Strategy at WisdomTree; Katie Richards, Head of New Markets and Product Development at Incore Bank; Murat Ögat, Co-founder and CEO at Aktionariat; and Pat LaVecchia, CEO and Founder of Oasis Pro. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 13 March 2025 Future of Finance hosted a one-day event at the offices of ReedSmith in London. Entitled Digital asset exchanges: Will tokenisation be the nemesis of exchanges or the re-making of them?, the event attracted more than 200 registrants from stock exchanges, trading venues, digital asset exchanges, fund administrators, central securities depositories, central counterparty clearing houses, technology vendors, data vendors, consultants, custodians, asset managers, wealth managers, banks, brokers, insurers, payments service providers, law firms, venture capital funds, cryptocurrency firms, blockchain platforms and academia. This is an account of what they and the panellists contributed to the five sessions that day, both live and in the multiple-choice questionnaire they completed in advance, the results of which are also published here.Panellists: Hirander Misra, Chairman and CEO of GMEX Group; Marcus van Abbé, Head of Digital Market Infrastructures at r3; Rita Martins, Head of Product Ecosystem, Digital Assets, at the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG); Dr Robert Barnes, co-CEO at BPX Digital Securities Exchange; and Thomas Labenbacher, CEO and Founder of Assetera. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 13 March 2025 Future of Finance hosted a one-day event at the offices of ReedSmith in London. Entitled Digital asset exchanges: Will tokenisation be the nemesis of exchanges or the re-making of them?, the event attracted more than 200 registrants from stock exchanges, trading venues, digital asset exchanges, fund administrators, central securities depositories, central counterparty clearing houses, technology vendors, data vendors, consultants, custodians, asset managers, wealth managers, banks, brokers, insurers, payments service providers, law firms, venture capital funds, cryptocurrency firms, blockchain platforms and academia. This is an account of what they and the panellists contributed to the five sessions that day, both live and in the multiple-choice questionnaire they completed in advance, the results of which are also published here.Panellists: Reyer Kooy, Global Head of Operations – Digital at Apex Group; Remo Glauser, Product Head in Tokenisation at Sygnum Bank; Prasanth Kalangi, Founder and CEO at Zoniqx; and Richard Shade, Chief Operating Officer at Archax. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Martin Hargreaves, Chief Product Officer at Quant Network. A Future of Finance interview with Quant Networks’ Chief Product Officer Martin Hargreaves. Quant is applying programmable payments to modernise payments processes and workflows, embedding programmability at customer account level rather than into the payments infrastructure. Speaking to Bob Currie, Contributing Editor at Future of Finance, Hargreaves describes how this model can improve automation, security and flexibility for users, while reducing fragmentation in the payments ecosystem. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Rob Krugman, Chief Digital Officer at Broadridge Interview.Rob Krugman, Chief Digital Officer at Broadridge, speaks to Bob Currie about how financial services organisations are thinking about their futures and how Broadridge applies a customer-led Agile development approach to drive its innovation strategy.Recognising that not every development idea will result in a live implementation, Krugman explores what makes the difference between success and failure and how it has applied this thinking to business use-cases, including the development of its ClearFi data insights platform and its distributed ledger repo solution. In managing its innovation lab, 605 Studios, Krugman explains how Broadridge supports a mix of ‘disruptive’ and ‘synergistic’ project initiatives, explaining why disruptive projects typically grow most effectively within the innovation hub, while synergistic projects may be better nurtured within existing business units and product teams.In doing so, Broadridge adopts a UniFI approach that attempts to break down the barriers between digital and traditional silos, with blockchain, tokenisation and AI technologies playing a central role in defining their mutual evolution. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Milo Guastamacchia, Founder and CEO or Yooro.Technology-driven securitisation platform Yooro aims to simplify investor access to private markets, focusing on investors in the European Union, UK, Switzerland and the UAE. The company’s Founder and Chief Executive Milo Guastamacchia speaks to Bob Currie about how this is reshaping approaches to fundraising in unlisted markets, while attracting new and wider categories of investor that may not have been attracted previously to private capital issues or structured products.The result, says Guastamacchia, is a more “democratic” pathway for private markets investment, delivering better access to the market, greater transparency and improved ‘voice’ for the investor.The sweet spot for Yooro is to apply securitisation and tokenisation in tandem, bringing real-world assets into a digital DLT-based environment and building secondary market liquidity in those instruments. Assets are typically held by a special purpose vehicle wrapper under Luxembourg law.More broadly, the discussion reflects on Yooro’s formation and ambitions, delivery of its Securitisation-as-a-Service methodology, and what the future holds as it expands its product set and solutions coverage. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance Interview with Richard Brown, Chief Technology and Product Officer at R3.R3 celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. Richard G. Brown, R3’s Chief Technology and Product Officer, speaks to Bob Currie about the drivers for Corda’s design, how these are changing, and how far the company has fulfilled the targets that it envisaged at formation. The discussion explores the potential for convergence of private and public blockchain ecosystems, thereby potentially making a wider range of higher-quality assets available to DeFi investors and tapping into a large pool of demand and liquidity sitting on public blockchain. But what can we say at this stage about the mechanics of building this cross-chain interoperability?In bringing real-world assets to DeFi, we examine how to retain the simplicity and accessibility of permissionless chains while accommodating TradFi’s complex lifecycles and risk protocols.In delivering convergence of public and private ecosystems, we address the difficulties in ensuring that financial institutions, and their regulators, are comfortable in transacting with investors or counterparties operating in a public ecosystem. What are the challenges in delivering the institutional-standard security and finality that these FIs will continue to expect?  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 13 February 2025 BX Digital hosted a virtual seminar that addressed the question: “Token markets need liquidity: Where will they get it from?” The importance of the topic is obvious. A market in which assets can be bought and sold quickly without moving the price is bound to grow more quickly than one in which assets can be bought and sold slowly, if at all, and only by moving the price in an adverse direction. By this criterion, the cryptocurrency markets, let alone the tokenised asset markets, lack sufficient liquidity.The conventional solution is to attract more issuers and investors. Unfortunately, it is fallacious. The experience of traditional markets shows that liquidity is not generated sufficiently by buyers and sellers alone. Furthermore, liquidity must be manufactured by market-makers, lead brokers, securities dealers, inter-broker dealers, exchanges and trading venues, banks, investment banks, and principal and high frequency trading firms. Yet blockchain was invented precisely to get rid of intermediaries such as these. So the purpose of the discussion hosted by BX Digital was to test whether blockchain-based finance can indeed scale without intermediaries, whether tokenisation can make the generation of liquidity more efficient and what exchanges can do to encourage the growth of liquidity.The seminar, held in conjunction with Future of Finance, attracted 116 registrants. They heard Lidia Kurt, CEO of BX Digital, Michael J. Cyrus, Head of Short-Term Products, Equity Finance & FX at DekaBank, Mike Reed, Head of Partnership Development for Digital Assets at Franklin Templeton, Jasmine Burgess, Chief Risk Officer at Coinbase Asset Management, and Lloyd Wahed, Founder and CEO at Members Capital Management, discuss the question from a variety of angles. The registrants contributed to the discussion by completing an on-line poll.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Future of Finance interview with Ciarán McGonagle, Chief Legal & Product Officer at Tokenovate.Tokenovate delivers post-trade automation for derivatives and securities finance trades. Chief Legal and Product Officer Ciarán McGonagle speaks to Future of Finance’s Bob Currie about how the company is applying blockchain and smart contract technology to build a financial ecosystem that is automated, resilient and efficient.Representing a financial product as a bundle of rights and obligations governed by conditional logic, McGonagle reflects on the flexibility offered by smart contracts in managing the cash flows, transfers of ownership and other lifecycle events associated with these contracts. He explains how Tokenovate’s unused transaction output (UTXO)-based model shapes the legal remedies available to asset owners in case of legal dispute or misappropriation – and how this may differ from other flavours of blockchain.Drawing on his previous experience working at ISDA, McGonagle discusses how Tokenovate is applying the common domain model (CDM) to translate standard representation of key trade terms into real-world systems and workflows. In closing, he reflects on how the company is contributing to public policy formation and potential outcomes from its representations in Washington and Brussels, its work with financial regulators and its participation at New York Climate Week. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 4 December 2024 Future of Finance hosted a one-day event at the offices of AON in London. Entitled Digital asset custody: What do asset managers and asset owners need to know about digital asset custody and custodians?, the event attracted 160 registrants from asset managers, banks, custodian banks, digital asset custodians, exchanges, financial market infrastructures, insurers, investment consultants, law firms, regulators and technology vendors. This is an account of what they and the panellists contributed to the seven sessions that day, both live and in the multiple-choice questionnaire they completed in advance, the results of which are also published here.The panellists for this discussion were Laurent Kssis, Board Member and Strategic Advisor to Issuance.Swiss AG; Philip Rage, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Soter Insure; Tariq Rasheed, a Partner at Reed Smith; Jeet Singh, Partner and EMEA Blockchain Leader at EY; and, as moderator, Ed Pugh, Development Director, Fintech and Digital Assets, at Aon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.