Where Finance Finds Its Future

The margin pressure exerted by asset management clients is forcing global custodian banks on to an unsustainable path of rising asset values and shrinking revenues. Tokenization, while rich in opportunity, could exacerbate the problem by increasing asset safety and compliance risks without reducing the need to invest in new technology. Financial market infrastructures reeling under the same pressures offer no immediate release in the form of cost-sharing. To contain the effects, custodians are consolidating, forming partnerships and investing in front-to-back-office outsourcing services built on managing the flows of data consumed by asset managers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Data is all about correlation rather than causation. But this is why it is so powerful. In the past, management decisions could be based on whatever the decision-maker deemed to matter. Now, the causal nature of decision-making is being challenged by a host of correlations. Of no market is this truer than the previously opinion-rich but near data-free zones of workforce management and office location, both of which the Pandemic has challenged at the elemental level. So the emergence of Vertis.ai, a market intelligence platform that aims to improve decision-making in the HR and commercial real estate industries by analysing billions of data points, could scarcely be more timely. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Sam Hocking, co-founder of Vertis.ai. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 now automating data flows in the primary debt capital markets and nurturing the growth of the open-source General Legal Mark-up Language (GLML), a standard for digitizing documents. Next up is derivatives. Future of Finance Co-founder Dominic Hobson caught up with Scott Eaton, CEO, and Co-founder Dr Vic Arulchandran. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 & Trust has just raised more than US$80 million to build a blockchain-based, institutional-grade custody service for asset managers. Future of Finance co-founder Dominic Hobson spoke to CEO Jack Macdonald. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Executive Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer at Persefoni, a company founded to help companies and their investors track ESG performance, but previously CEO of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the world's largest ESG reporting standard. He spoke to Future of Finance co-founder Dominic Hobson. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Future of Finance co-founder Dominic Hobson spoke to Angus Scott, CEO of ArtClear, a company whose founders are applying their experience of safekeeping and settlement in the securities markets to an industry where trust and automation are in short supply. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 is even now drawing crypto-currencies into its orbit. One reason FX has retained its freebooting personality is the fact it is regulated everywhere (because banks are regulated) but nowhere. But the real secret of its continued riches is the continuing indifference of the biggest end-users – asset managers, institutional investors and corporates – to value for money in FX. Dr Jamie Walton, co-founder of Raidne, told Dominic Hobson how he is now using the techniques he mastered as a rates quant to help those end-users monitor and trim FX transaction costs and manage the risks of market manipulation and abuse. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 to exploit the accelerating convergence between investment banking, private securities placement, trading and market making, wealth management, crypto-currencies and security tokens. In the light of that strategy, reinventing transfer agency makes perfect sense. Future of Finance co-founder Dominic Hobson spoke to Entoro founder and managing partner Jim Row about where 1transfer came from and where it is going. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 national borders?7. What opportunities do CBDCS create for banks to reinvent themselves? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.