SIBOS 20: Future of money: how it affects everyone, every business
by Jack Large
Occasionally there are sessions at conferences or talks I listen to that remain in my mind for days and weeks, even months. I muse about them, I worry about them.
The Future of money debate at SIBOS this week was such a session. The debaters were:
- Moderator: James Lloyd, APAC FinTech & Payments Leader, EY-Parthenon
- David G.W. Birch, Principal, 15Mb Ltd and Global Ambassador to Consult Hyperion
- Lana Swartz, Assistant Professor, University of Virginia; author of New Money: How Payment Became Social Media (Yale University Press 2020) and the co-editor of Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks
- Thomas Zschach, Chief Innovation Officer, SWIFT
The panel considered the social, political, economic and cultural implications of key financial technologies – as well as what the history of money can and cannot tell us about its future: from Bitcoin to Libra, from the ‘exorbitant privilege’ enjoyed by the US dollar to China’s central bank-issued digital currency, from cold hard cash to cold storage crypto.
Issues and ideas thrown up in the debate included:
- Is money a media technology?
- Now moving into an era where money is more diverse and is now mass media with multiple channels, a less central state-dominated
- Today we are using many more monetary channels than we think, e.g. Airmiles, etc.
- Dollar dominance: same as a pound dominance 150 years ago which disappeared, so will dollar dominance. The issue is not which currency dominates rather “are we going to be using currency at all?”
- Money is memory; it is a substitute for remembering who owes what to whom
- Internet and connected devices remember who owes what to whom, so will we need money in future?
- Internet Of Things will change the whole role of money; no longer will men and women be the centre of most transactions. Machines will dominate most transactions
- Changes in the economy is driving the changes in money because all becoming digital – e-commerce, payments, etc.
- Central Bank Digital Currency: will change how we think of money, particularly programmable money
- How will money operate in future: Swift is an affectionate tribute to 1970s, not obvious what it will do when getting CBDC; if decentralisation continues then why need whole payment infrastructure?
- All technology revolution is additive not a revolution, BUT when getting revolution sometimes don’t even notice it!!
- When things go digital other problems are created, e.g. impact of CBDC is not understood??
- Who gets to decide and control? Who pushes back?: On programmable money? On dollar dominance?
- Which currency accepted? The key driver is a matter of identity
- Who sets terms of access/of the transaction? It will be driven by AI /machine learning but how to ensure vulnerable are protected?
- Humans will no longer be the centre of payments
- Major books recommended for reading to understand what is going on
- Do not exclude people digitally or it could lead to a revolution.
CTMfile take: Superb. Simply mind-blowing session. Get someone who attended SIBOS or a friend at Swift to let you listen to this session. You won’t regret it.
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