Where Finance Finds Its Future

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 - “frictionless ownership transfers of assets” - is capable of extension far beyond the starting-point. Future of Finance co-founder Dominic Hobson spoke with Tilman Fechter, a Member of the Executive Board and Head of Banking, Funding and Financing at Clearstream Banking and also a member of the Board of HQLAx, and Nick Short, chief operating officer (COO) at HQLAx, about the short and long term ambitions of the business. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 agents, conveyancers, lawyers, surveyors, mortgage brokers, lenders, data vendors and government offices – also have much to gain. Dan Salmons, CEO of Coadjute, a start-up whose purpose is to digitise the UK housing market, explained to Future of Finance co-founder Dominic Hobson why it also makes sense for intermediaries to welcome greater efficiency. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 banks, whose work in managing counterparty, settlement and liquidity risk they consider to be more than useful.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 transactions in an on-chain repo market– The use of bonds as collateral to secure commercial and central bank money– Settlement of bond transactions on and off chain Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 banks, whose work in managing counterparty, settlement and liquidity risk they consider to be more than useful.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 digital asset custodian Onchain Custodian, has drawn on 22 years in the securities services industry with BNY Mellon and SWIFT to build a service that makes institutional investors comfortable about investing in the token economy. He spoke to Future of Finance co-founder Dominic Hobson about the current state and likely development of the security token markets, what could happen to traditional service providers and the importance of standardising data exchanges. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 crypto-currencies and tokenization, but advises crypto-currency investment funds. Dr Angerer is also closely following developments in the Liechtenstein security token market following the passage of the Blockchain Law in January 2020. He spoke to Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, about crypto-currencies, crypto-currency funds, security token offerings, DeFi and the market infrastructure a token economy needs to make it grow. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 the topics Future of Finance co-founder Dominic Hobson raised with Jim Cunha, an SVP at the Boston Fed who has added applied research into CBDCS to his long experience and expertise in payments, technology, innovation, security and fraud prevention. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 trade finance be consolidated by market forces alone?6. What are the sources of data in trade finance that are valuable enough to be mined?7. Do conventional trade finance banks have an incentive to capture and use the data they process and create? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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, and one person who knows how the custodians and CSDs are responding is Vivekanand Ramgopal. That is because he is vice president and head of TCS Financial Solutions at Tata Consultancy Services, whose TCS Bancs securities processing platform is used by dozens of custodian banks and CSDs. Significantly, Vivek also heads Quartz, a new set of blockchain-based services to support investment in crypto-currencies and security tokens. He spoke to Future of Finance co-founder Dominic Hobson. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.