 All right. Let's get going. Looks like we've got 20 people with us. My name is Dave Treat. I lead our blockchain and multi-party systems business at Accenture, and we've been focused on central bank digital currency for years now. In the second half of this session, our global lead for central bank digital currency, John Villasarios, is going to take over and join us. There's John now. He can wave. He's going to come back in a few minutes. I am thrilled to have here with me just a fantastic partner friend colleague in GenPV from the DTCC. Gen is leading some transformational work in the space of how distributed ledger technology is going to fundamentally, has the potential to fundamentally reshape capital markets and just doing some of the deepest thinking around what does it really mean and how does it really work? And so we're going to start this session with a focus on just the specific use case. Let me pause here. I guess I'm going to start with a little bit of a background on CBDC, and then Jen and I will get into it back and forth. But, Jen, do you want to say hi or introduce yourself any better than I just heard? Nice job. We're happy to be here. Looking forward to the discussion. I do think that now is just a really interesting and exciting time across our industry in a lot of different ways, and the use of technology, including blockchain, is really changing how we work, what our future is going to look like. And so this is just fun. It's actually just a lot of fun to be a part of it right now. Yes, and you're in a privileged position as a leading thought leader in terms of where it plays out. So let me just set the stage for anyone in the audience who is not up to speed on the whole central bank digital currency phenomenon. I'm just going to spend three minutes and then we'll get into the details of core capital markets. So across the board, we're multiple years in. Actually, John may tell the story of when we started to build our central bank digital currency, our blockchain team in 2015, our very first client was a central bank and a lot of work has been happening very quietly for years. And it's not so quiet anymore. It's gotten very loud as the promise of introducing a third form of money, a tokenized form, a digitally native form of fiat currency, and the power that that can bring to a whole range of use cases that do range from financial inclusion and retail transactions to core capital markets, infrastructure, cross-border payments, remittances, etc. And so lots of work has been done. The BIS put out a report in the fall saying that 80% of the world's central banks have embarked on this journey and that a material number of them will be in a production or pre-production stance by 2024. And so we can attest to that. I think that's a great report. Those are good numbers based on what we're seeing in the market. The difference here is that through distributed ledger technology, we have the ability to have uniqueness in the digital world and ownership. And that creates the ability to fundamentally rethink money and create a form of it that can be directly transferred, that can have some of the characteristics of physical cash, but do many more things. And John may go into more of that, but across the board there are just material initiatives underway to explore the valuable use cases, figure out where there's real value, where there isn't. It isn't a panacea for all money. It has very specific uses. And so I'm going to leave more of the details to John to talk about what's going on in the global landscape. But I want to take advantage of the time with Jen. And so Jen, maybe just as a starting point, just high level observations direction around why is this interesting for core capital markets infrastructure? Central bank digital currencies in particular. I think we all want faster payment rails. I think even in our personal lives we want faster payment rails. We all love the immediacy of things. And so this is, by rethinking how we can process settlements and payments across our various asset classes and functions, I think there's just some really interesting opportunities to hopefully reduce costs. I think I don't personally have any numbers behind that to justify that it's a way to lower costs. But ultimately when you think about how blockchain works and you think about the distributed nature of the data and its ability to to have this overall transparency to the network and what's happening. I think you can assume that there's some cost reduction over time that you could see. I think efficiency, I mean we love efficiency in our industry as well. And I think that's another reason why. I think to the extent that the better use of capital you have the more you can do. The more liquidity you can bring to the markets and being able to have a better control over that I think is probably top of mind for many of the folks in our industry today. Yeah and so let's come back to the really, really focus of CVDC. The real focus of CVDC but even pull back for a second. The DTC has done some fantastic work over the past years with Project Ion and Whitney. Just talk for a minute around the importance of tokenization broadly and the tokenization as a concept. And maybe also focus on where there was some wild exuberance early on, particularly in the startup community or the community that was kind of outside of core capital markets. Instant settlement is the thing and it's all going to be bilateral and instant and wouldn't that be great. Just spend a few minutes. Let's just dispel some of the myths around where it's where tokenization of the securities and the cash and the settlement processes. People need to have an understanding of where it's valuable and where it's definitely not. Yeah so for me so a lot of these projects that you just mentioned have been fantastic experiences for us and we've been able to partner on them and it has been great. Working with clients around the concepts, validating the concepts, understanding what their real pain points and needs are. All of that has been fantastic but it's all been driven and stays with me. I think I've been with DTCC now six years and I think a year in might came out to one of our fintech forums and said if anyone's going to disintermediate us it's going to be us. I think that the concept that blockchain disintermediates in this day and age I think is is not so much of a it's not so prevalent but what is prevalent is that firms really need to think about how to operate differently in the future. When we look at how we do our how we process transactions today and how we operate and how we communicate with each other and share data and things of that nature there's a lot of it that's archaic and so if we're going to take ourselves into the next 40 years what is that going to look like and I think we've got technology advancements, communication advancements have just changed the narrative for us and so it's imperative that we start to look at these things. Tokenization just fit right into that. It was again another question from Mike who's been a tremendous innovation leader for us who said hey guys what is you know all this ICO stuff is going on like you know what is this going to mean for us what happens next and so we've had the we've had the fortunate role within the organization to look at these different innovations and think about not just what they are right now because quite frankly I think all innovations evolve and what what they start as is not what they end up as right and they that's not what ends up actually making the most impact and so I think now we've seen a couple of years where there's been an evolution of the use of more digitalized assets and how that could potentially drive greater value for our industry so breaking down you know that you know being able to take assets put them on a blockchain create automation wrap that automation around the asset if you will and drive efficiency through better data distribution transparency you know etc and even ease of access there's also just over time you know do you ease the access to your networks and your platforms and drive greater business opportunities and I know I've heard a lot we talk a lot about new business models that can come off of the back of this these are all things that we think about and want to be a part of so with Project Ion and Whitney they each had somewhat different hypotheses going in but each of them was originally designed to tackle a question around tokenization what does it mean if we want to re-represent tokens or securities on a blockchain that's Ion and then what does it mean if we want to natively issue tokens and manage those assets etc that became Whitney two different markets public markets private markets so really interesting opportunities for us to explore the concepts and understand what the real value is now I'll close with this one thing you you said you know can we get faster settlement on blockchain you know you can get faster settlement on a better payment rail period so I don't know that has to be blockchain but and I certainly don't think that you know with regards to the securities markets blockchain doesn't actually reduce the capital requirements or the capital considerations that firms have who are um transacting in that space right that you know what really drives that is reducing the date by which you settle and so if the industry gets behind and you know as I think as everyone knows is getting behind right now a t1 settlement that will inevitably reduce the capital that's required and therefore free up that capital for other uses and improve the end-to-end process you don't need blockchain to do that can blockchain potentially take us a step further we think there is there's possibilities there but we're still working through that yeah no thank thank you you know for that I think it's um it there's it's it's obviously on the surface you know it seems you know it there's lots of misunderstanding of the simplicity of well I'm just buying and selling an asset you know what you know the um the the massive you know value and and service that that clearing houses provide and the DTC provides you know um you know around being able to net and compress that activity so that the for the efficiency of the system the liquidity is key I think the other thing that you know Jen we've we've we've spent a lot of time talking about is when you think about the modernization of the of the of our financial infrastructure and and the systems that are required to be able to carry forward you know the the fundamental you know the fundamental depth of understanding of what systemically important infrastructure is and how it needs to operate and the expectations around it and and the control mechanisms um you know just crucially important and and the you know arguably the DTC is is the you know I it has to be in the ranking if you were ever to say you know this to sit around and say what is the most successful consortia ever you know it has to rank up there right in its history of you know 170 clearing participants you know trillions in value flowing through it and you know all on a systemically important infrastructure basis how do you think about kind of how the you know as as modernization you know as as we hit a wave of modernization how do you think about the you know the the you know the current you know highest standard of security resilience you know control predictability that that you know the DTC provides to these systems today how do you think about how you know how that plays out as we go through this wave of innovation you know I think it's it's somewhat like any new technology really even cloud technology cloud has been around now for at least a decade and and you know financial institutions are still getting you know themselves ready to adopt in a more meaningful way around tier one applications etc there's still there's still time for that technology to mature to meet the the resiliency and the performance and the scalability needs and and things of that nature of of our highly regulated entities and um so with blockchain again I think you know as we look at tokenization and blockchain and the and the combination and use of multiple technologies I think we have to apply that same lens I mean our we've spent decades learning about the pitfalls of implementing new technology and dealing with bugs and and things of that nature not what things seem to work really well right now that doesn't mean we shouldn't modernize and we shouldn't think about how to how to get us you know moving into and become even more operationally efficient but we do have to keep in mind that what we what we do today matters in it in it and it's critical and those critical applications should not be taken lightly so when it comes to thinking about implementing a new blockchain technology or network you know you have to think about the governance of that network and you have to think about who's providing that governance and you know who's managing you know updates who's resolving issues or problems who's ultimately to a regulator accountable for that network and how are you going to maintain it how are you going to provide transparency to how the participants will operate on the platform and who does what and how tech new technology or new smart contracts or new elements of the blockchain technologies are deployed and when and what does that mean for your ecosystem or your network of participants and how they've adopted nodes or apis and things of that nature so I think you know thinking about all of those components that's what trusted intermediaries do today right we put those wrappers around our platforms our infrastructure to help protect and ensure the integrity of our markets and so this is this technology is is no different the way the way that we look at it we just hope that it it enables and drives some even greater value than what we have today but in terms of just operating it I think we need to apply a lot of what we do today in the lessons that we've learned over the course of these last several decades onto the use of new technology yeah I'm looking at some of the questions coming in you know a good one from John Carpenter here around around t-plus one settlement and envisioning going to t-zero and maybe let me let me extend the question a little bit like is that even you know what about dynamic or variable or opportunistic settlement windows like what's the what's your view on what we should be thinking about or you know are you thinking about as an industry and talking about from as a potential person you know rather than just a binary you know yeah rather than prescribing something I feel like there's a there's a better opportunity to set ourselves up with technology to do what the industry needs when they need it right and so you know I look we've spent a lot of time with clients we continue to spend a lot of time with our clients to understand the impacts of moving to different settlement dates and and without without critical mass moving to a settlement a short settlement cycle doesn't add a lot of value right if you've only got one person that's willing to transact with you on an accelerated basis that doesn't actually result in much difference to you I think at the end of the day I think what's more important for us to think about rather than we need to prescribe t-zero or we need to prescribe you know multiple settlement slices throughout the day or real-time settlement or whatever um is to real is just to think about the implementation of technology on a going forward basis in a more flexible manner so including things like real-time netting capabilities and positioning so that you know where you're at at any given point in time and then you know the settlement the settlement discussion can evolve as the industry evolves and you know and and they become new services so the things around equities clearing the settlement for example and this is I believe the asset class we're talking about that those other products and services as they start to evolve and become more real-time and or t you know t then you know then the opportunity just opens up for different you know different settlements right so yeah and if I and I couldn't agree more that the I guess the other important part of that too is if it's if it's separate if it's if there are separate legs for the movement and the and the verification of settlement of the security and the cash um that obviously then you know naturally um or implicitly involves then you know a set of messaging and reconciliation processes that you know may not give us you know we started lots to be gained and we could get money you know we could get much faster on today's systems as as Mike and you and Rob and you know to talk about you know all the time but but if we think about the technology capabilities that can be applied and that are being tested right that also you know I think that ultimate flexibility that you reference to then configure to what the what the users want you know that that notion of doing delivery versus payment and in in a single step you know at the right moment of you know of the cash and the security creates max you know creates that maximum flexibility and I think that's you know that's the that's what we have to explore is the the implications of that right you know because you're talking about refunded models and you're talking about you know having to change your cash management processes and and all the way back to the you know to access to the Fed window and and you know in the central bank digital currency that supports it so that's really important David because again this isn't about you know this is the industry moving towards a different settlement date is is a huge positive right getting a t1 is going to is going to create a lot of value for the industry but this isn't you know this again this really is about thinking more broadly about how you improve your end-to-end processes not just this one thing and I do believe that asset class is a really important conversation here you know and regions and locate like locations like you know when you think about the volume you mentioned that you referenced it earlier you know going to tease your real-time gross you know without having that benefiting the industry benefiting from that netting capability is you know could be worse like could be worse for them right and so ultimately you know you have to think about the market you're addressing the asset class here that you're addressing the size of that marketplace the volume of activity the value you get in netting birth you know on a t1 basis or t i think that all of that stuff comes into comes into play as you're as we're moving this stuff forward yeah and and and you know this the i mean the thing one of the things i'm excited about is it plays into our industry strength right all right you know you get you know provided the technical capability to to do some of the things you're talking about we are fantastic as an industry of pricing that like you know the risk pricing the transaction pricing that you know the the you know the further you know the further further you know configurability and product and services that can be built up around it to to you know increase liquidity you know you know increase you know cash management collateral management you know all of that is just i think a fantastic frontier we gotta have that foundation to be able to work from it and again um you know what what what what you started to build gives us you know those first insights i think it's fantastic um craig i'm gonna and uh and eric i'm gonna some of these questions that are out there i'm gonna unless gen wants to i you know gen gen's gen's cat you know our capital markets you know core you know global expert i'm gonna save some of the retail stuff for uh for uh velisarius to handle here in a minute um unless gen you want to jump in on it i'm happy to give my personal views as a as a retailer but that's about it yeah so let me let me save some of those for uh for john in a few minutes but um you know gen in terms of in terms of um you know certain certainly there are um you know in the hyperledger community we've got a you know we've got a large number of of your clients and our clients um you know you know here and in the ecosystem and we're all working together you know what what would you you know what would you recommend with respect to how you know how and where to engage you know the opportunities that the you know that that are out there to um you know to get to get directly involved with you know the fundamental rethinking of what core capital markets infrastructure should be uh in you know in in the future i think um like i we've got a number of different touch points across the client communities i think to the extent that that there's interest across the open source community and just under better understanding kind of what we're doing i think we've got a um you know on our website you can reach out and submit you know some requests to to meet things of that nature and we've posed a lot around what we're doing from a fintech standpoint uh rob platnick is chair of the governing board for hyperledger um so there's opportunities through there and i think on different projects we've had some technology resources that are contributing as well and so there's there's certainly some some opportunities just to engage and network along those lines you know that that's great and um and i suppose um it you know important to say that um you know in in some of the work that's been done already we've we put good use you know put put some of the hyperledger code to good use you know in particular the you know cactus and blockchain automation framework uh you know focus it's um even our project whitney prototype we um after we after we um connected to ethereum we then connected to you know connected the prototype to hyperledger um so that was that was a good experience as well for us yeah excellent um any any last thoughts jen and you know i i probably sorry for the rest of you i promised jen she could throw as many questions to me as i did to her and i've not given her that chance so i think this has been a great discussion i think you know one of the things i probably just would probably end on here is there's within our within our financial industry it's often difficult to um to get people to understand that things just don't happen as quickly as they often like them to but things are happening and so i think just across excenture across ctcc and there are you know there's many many other financial institutions in the space that are progressing the conversation and use cases and business opportunities using distributed ledger and tokenized assets and even looking at concept of digital currencies and so i think it's it should be viewed upon as just incredibly positive to see see these um iterations continue i think it's only gonna you know ramp up and be you know accelerate over time so i'd say don't lose faith people are still we're working really hard it's just that some of these problems are just not easy things to solve overnight so um so i'd say that's all all good things are happening right now awesome well um jan i appreciate you joining joining in this discussion with us and um and yes yeah between you know jan rob um you know you know me there there are a number of of of of the leadership team uh you know very focused on central bank digital currency and the and the and you know wider tokenization potential for core capital markets infrastructure so um i'm seeing there's one last question before we have to pivot here uh say we already have the technology used by client fabric um yeah there are a number of technologies being you know are being applied and yes it's uh you know there's we you know as you can imagine right with jan and rob and my focus on the you know hyper ledger board of the you know open source is a key you know is key to this whole space um particularly as we get you know as we talk about interoperability and and how important that's going to be as we connect these islands of implementation of different ecosystems um so gen thank you uh thank you so much um uh gen and i are going to drop here but i'm going to bridge to john velisarios who's gonna um you've been patient john um yeah wait patiently waiting here um i'm going to pivot uh bridge to john uh who as i said in the opening leads our central bank digital currency work at eccentric globally and has been at it for gosh you know six years officially but probably more like eight um if i if i think about your other roles john um and uh and uh and john i'll john i'll dive into some of the uh the work that's happening globally how to think about it get to some of these questions here around um the whole umbrella space of digital currency being you know cryptocurrency stablecoin and cbdc and why they are each fundamentally different and where they're you know where what the use cases are for each um and uh and with that uh john you guys are in great hands i were going to turn over to john and uh and thanks everyone for uh for your time and uh and questions uh look forward to engaging offline john thanks so much thank you john over to you uh oh i can't hear you john all right well john sorts out his audio issue i've got like two two minutes before i've got to run the support actually uh uh there is a um no hopefully we get john back here all right so i'm gonna i'm gonna watch my clock very carefully i've got uh interestingly there's a there's a senate banking hearing today um i that uh that i have to go support in the background for uh on central bank digital currency uh where um christian carlo on behalf of the digital dollar project is going to be testifying around uh the the progress within the us context of of uh you doing some real uh testing pilot testing of of cbdc in the use cases and uh and what what we've seen is just a fantastic lean in from the uh from the regulatory community um and the and the hill on wanting to uh wanting to learn and understand and and make sure we're we have uh chris consistent language to to talk through all of the the the policy choices ahead of us the the value cases the you know the modernization of regulation um helen do you think we're gonna get john back i was just i'm gonna pop on and say if you want to run i can stay and help facilitate john joining uh rejoining okay um i do need i do need to go um so i apologize we will have a brief interlude um uh and uh um thanks again uh hopefully john can get back on here in a second but um thanks for everyone's time uh i apologize i have to go thanks great thank you so much so everyone we will just uh stand by and wait for john to uh rejoin i am back can everyone hear me okay just checking sound check yes fantastic oh right sorry about that i had to uh disconnect and reconnect uh not uh not ideal um thank you everyone uh for sticking around uh look forward to sort of this presentation thanks for for taking the time um today to listen to dave and jen about more about sort of uh cbdc and the work that we're doing in this space uh and i know what's been what's been happening i think just globally uh in terms of the whole topic of cbdc um i i just want to share i guess a little bit of background behind uh behind what's been going on over the last several years um first of all just to just to comment a little bit about our history in this area we've been working in this space as dave mentioned uh for several years our work actually our very first project in in this uh space uh was with the very was with the central bank several years ago and since then we've been working with a number of different central banks both in the retail space and in the wholesale space and um and this whole this whole space has been sort of taking off uh incredibly over the last year at least and and i see this sort of as a continuing trend uh at least for at least for a couple of years if not much more than that the bis as dave mentioned uh has also been bank for international settlements has also been very actively involved in this area and trying to grow sort of the awareness and the knowledge and sharing experiences and building out sort of a sort of the whole uh thought leadership behind uh the central bank's short currencies and in addition to that we also see sort of quite a lot of central banks around the world and i'll mention a few of them uh all public of course uh that have been developing solutions and trying to experiment pilot implement various uh sort of projects and so on to sort of take the cbdc to the next level but before we do that i think i want to mention a couple of things about what's the innovation behind cbdc um and i think this is uh there's some questions as well that sort of came up before but i'll try to answer them as they sort of come across here uh but the real innovation is the ability to sort of bundle of both the value and the ownership uh in a single item that you can transfer from one entity to the next whether it's a bank paying another financial institution whether it's a security settlement or whether it's uh whether it's a consumer paying another consumer um or get transferring money to another individual it's the value of of this solution and approach which is now possible because of the technology that enables all of this to take off and i think uh why now i think there's a couple of reasons why we see this happening one is the technologies become much more mature uh the innovation i guess with cryptocurrencies from over a decade ago in addition to the number of developments in the whole dlt space have enabled this kind of technology to actually be enabling sort of the central bank digital currency and enabling it to take off and this i think is is a really key sort of uh sort of milestone i think from a from a financial and technology uh innovation perspective so that's the first thing and the second thing that i think sort of there's a lot of there's a lot more sort of appetite for it in the marketplace there's a digital assets cryptocurrencies stable coins a variety of different new sort of financial instruments products innovations developments and so on that are that are taking off and and what what we're seeing with central banks is they also don't want to be left behind and i think many of the many of the central banks that we're working with sort of are also you know conscious that corporations like the large corporations that are looking at implementing their own version of money tokenized money stable coins and what have you also also can create potentially competitive pressure on on central banks and some geographies for instance and regardless i think this is also it opens the door for much more developments to take off now we've taken a look at sort of what's happening around the globe there's a digital dollar project in the U.S. the digital euro you know that the ECB has announced that they will be looking into in addition to the digital GVP initiative it's been taking off and you can sort of see the story play out in many different geographies around the globe there are countries like in sweden for instance that have been very active in this area for several years researching writing a bunch of writing white papers soliciting sort of interest from the market and input from the market and so on in addition to sort of also implementing sort of the pilots that we are involved in and in their in their sort of progression in this area and and looking at it from primarily from a retail perspective but also other central banks looking at it from a broader wholesale perspective such as South Africa that's been also experimenting with this in this area both in retail and wholesale historically Bank of Canada and AS has been very actively involved in this area as well also central banks in the Middle East and so on so the the story goes on and on i think with regards to this is many different central banks that around the world that have been sort of implementing sort of pilots and really the flick of things this is where i think the innovation is taking off what we're seeing is sort of central banks developing sort of answering exam questions in the form of pilots but also taking it to the next level where they're actually implementing it for with the intent of implementing something in the future now there are sort of a couple of different areas that we look at when we talk about central bank digital currency the first one is in the retail space so what's happening in the retail in the broader retail space and i think from a consumer point of view it begs the question why does the consumer need a central bank digital currency when there's a plethora of commercial bank money and commercial payment systems that are out there and i'll get to that in a second wholesale which Jennifer and Dave you know very went into lots of detail about and also the cross-border space where there's a lot of a lot of potential because of the friction associated with cross-border payments now if you start looking at all of these it's almost like a Venn diagram you can start combining all three of these and sort of seeing retail cross-border commercial or wholesale cross-border and so on and there's a lot of potential there for reducing counterparty risk taking friction out of the process of value transfers and so on but also creating new types of financial instruments that were not possible before we look at CBBC as a third format of format of money form of money and today you have two different formats of money you have banknotes so the consumers hold in their wallet and you have central bank money in digital form primarily in the form of a of an rtgs platform and a system that allows a ledger to be able to be updated with positions that a central bank holds against a number of commercial banks that hold accounts with the central bank but nowhere is there any sort of central bank liability digital format for consumers or even for commercial entities so this is this gives us the ability to actually create and innovate and to develop something entirely new this new format of money is is possible because of the technology that we talked about but also it enables a number of things that were previously not possible instant value bearing digital tokens that could be spent by consumers to pay one another merchants to pay merchants for instance or even organizations to pay each other and also enabling things like cross-border payments in a direct peer-to-peer relationship which i think is is quite unique and also highly innovative we also see the opportunity for this new format of money to enable something that was not possible before holding a central bank liability in digital format outside of one's jurisdiction and i think this today is something that any type of central bank liability apart from other type of treasury notes and other things that are not cbc not cbc of course are sort of not in digital format held in another jurisdiction and as a result what we see is that that can create an interesting dynamic where you can have offshore or extracurricular settlement and payments in a way that that was not possible before and this is exactly one of the projects that we're working on with the banter france and the cross-border initiative with another central bank where we can settle with central bank money in an extracurricular environment and i think that is that can create a very very different dynamic than we've ever seen before and this is where the innovation will take us i think also you know jennifer mentioned in that we don't know sort of you know we sort of see the the path in front of us and probably a couple iterations deeper but we really don't know how far this can go and what it can potentially enable and this is this is where the innovation can really take in there are a number of things to consider of course things like you know interoperability standardization how do you enable this on a global basis and allow sort of entities to continue to pay one another and operate interoperate and today the financial system has done a fantastic job of stitching all of that together and enabling sort of through a series of complex plumbing and wiring a lot of us to be able to interoperate and work on a global basis and i think from a cvc point of view this is still very very early days because what we what we need to do is is develop what we what is currently there in that kind of infrastructure but in a new format of money which of course is not straightforward to do so i think that's where we will spend a lot of a lot of cycles and so things like open source are going to be key things like technologies that allow a lot of interoperability going to be key and open as well will be very important for us to to explore as we develop these kind of innovations now if i look at sort of the future and i'll only talk briefly about some of the projects and and i think that if i look at sort of where this could potentially go i think there's a number of of these innovations that will take us take us into sort of what the future looks like i mentioned a little bit about retail and from from a consumer point of view it begs the question you know what's the benefit for for a consumer and that i think is and it's an interesting question we've also been talking about that at length as well on projects and it isn't very obvious what is a cvc sort of like digital currency the benefit of cvc for a consumer versus um from a wholesale or commercial application and from a consumer most likely the vast majority of people will probably not know what a cvc is or central bank digital currency is versus their electronic money or or e-money or even money in their bank account and i think that's that's an important point to to sort of realize and also that requires a lot of education and stakeholder engagement and involvement in order to take this to the next level and i think this is also part of these kind of projects where when we talk about cvc and we look at it from a consumer point of view we also need to be very mindful that we have to have that sort of engagement with a wider marketplace on a wholesale basis there are a lot of other applications that we see and and where we talk about settlement and specifically sort of settlement of securities trading and as jennifer pointed out we see sort of you know having a digital asset tokenized digital asset and a tokenized form of digital cash only then do we have truly the ability to do a dvp settlement and and apart from settlement windows settlement cycles and compressing it from a time perspective there's this also allows a different sort of models of exchange and settlement in such a way that that immediately not necessarily just the speed but also the elimination of the counterparty risk i think is the one of the benefits of using it from a securities point of view and this is where we also see a lot of applications of this and enabling different types of dvp models that that when you have a tokenized form of an asset and a tokenized form of cash enabling sort of that instant value transfer asset transfer to take place in a risk free risk less risk free or highly reduced risk environment and i think this is where we see sort of it playing out in capital markets as well as in other forms of of cvc applications in cross-border as i mentioned before there's a lot of there are a lot of frictions time delay cost there are a number of other sort of things to consider with regards to cross-border payments liquidity access to liquidity and and so on and i think when we see sort of applications of multiple cvc is being implemented then we will end up sort of seeing a lot of very interesting sort of cross-border applications of of this taking off and i think this is where there will be a lot of developments that are going to be happening when multiple central banks issue their their central bank digital currency and allow sort of participants outside of their jurisdiction to hold it and transact it then we will see very interesting fx models of x trades bilateral trades in addition to sort of new types of commercial applications taking off and that's when we can embed things like contract cross-border payments trade finance and so on into these end-to-end sort of processes so i think this there's quite a lot of scope i think from from all of those three dimensions now i'll i'll pause there i'm going to start sort of looking at some of the questions and maybe you can answer some of the questions because i know that there's a few of them that have been uh listed here and if you have any more please feel free to sort of drop them in i i'll look at kreg asks a question thank you kreg for the question a key concern around deploying a cvc seems to be unintended consequences that could impact retail banking providers what strategies are you seeing sort of central banks adopting to avoid these excellent question we sort of uh when we look at sort of retail cvc projects we also sort of look at optimal configurations of those models and in that there are a number of sort of what i would call uh c parameters to look at and one of them is really looking at sort of what's the role of commercial banks in a central bank digital currency deployment and we see sort of a two-tier model where central banks in exchange for reserves issue cvc to commercial banks who then in exchange for deposits issue them to consumers in that model what we're doing is we're basically replacing the cash through an atm transaction with a digital version of that for consumers and and the role of the commercial bank is very much the kyc aml relationship holder with a with the end user the consumer uh issuer of the wallet perhaps and the registration of that wallet and then allowing sort of that wallet to contain sort of that cvc that could that could that will be used in sort of transactions by consumers um and i think there uh there are a lot of other type of things to keep in mind in those kind of implementations the first one is really looking at how do you uh ensure that you know there isn't a digital run basically basically everybody withdrawing all other deposits converting them into cvc's and then running off with it and creating that digital run uh for from uh from uh from from the banks perspective and i think that's a very important point and there are a number of things that i would i would say there are mitigating factors one is would you store all of your wealth or all of your money in a digital wallet um if you if you wanted to do that i mean at the end i guess you could convert it instantaneously from your deposit put it into the wallet but would you do that would you put your entire life savings in those wallets so and at the same time would you put through policy and other type of controls would there be a single wallet issued to a consumer uh would you have limits on the wallet could you put sort of threshold and and ceiling limits in terms of how much you can hold on the wallet in order to contain that kind of a uh and to mitigate that kind of a risk of a bank a digital bank run in addition to that um the reason why you also have a this digital bank run is because consumers get sort of uh nervous and go to the bank to withdraw the money and of course there's not enough physical money to withdraw from the bank yes that will deplete sort of the bank's reserves but also there's a physical dimension of not not having as much money to be able to give to the consumers to begin with of course that's a fractional reserve bank in a digital bank run environment in such an environment in a stressed environment central bank could intervene could potentially um to the bank uh inject it infuse it with uh cvdc at the tide it over until there's a until that run and scenario it sort of sort of goes away and there is an infinite sort of limit or you know digital there's no digital limit to how much can be issued in such an environment in a physical environment of course you're limited by how much people can withdraw from an ATM and how fast you can stuff those banknotes into an ATM and all of that will create sort of that level of panic which will continue to sort of progress so if consumers felt you know i wanted my money i hit the button and i get all my money well now what do i do with all that money like just a bit there or do i put it back where i where i came from whereas in a physical you know environment it's a different experience so i think hopefully craig i've answered that question um and uh you know give you sort of some sort of perspective that there are a number of um sort of scenarios that could be mitigated through policy controls and other types of physical uh digital controls that you can put on wallets and and also how you set up the environment from a to a single single to a two-tier structure so basically using the commercial banks as a way to distribute uh you know mirroring the cash distribution cycle that you have today with the current banking system so hopefully that answers the question um paper announced in February that it would uh it would like to be a cdc distributor what do you foresee as the primary channels by which cdc will be rolled out the republic um commercial banks payment service providers potentially uh e-mining organizations that are out there uh psps basically uh i don't think there's a limit uh to sort of the uh i think they would have to be sort of regulated entities that have proper kyc and aml checks which paypal does they do that kind of stuff for their for their clients and for their consumers um and i think those would be the kind of organizations that would you know be ideal for running sort of uh being sort of a distributor of cdc into into the market and i could see you know organizations like paypal and other psps and other sort of providers globally you know stepping into that role uh because it's all digital in nature and also having multiple walls that you can use gives you the ability to then run that as well you know as part of one of the main currency currencies in this case currency type that you could you could also host in terms of those kind of publications so i think that that's definitely a doable one and i think there are going to be a number of psps that will step into that role we've seen that in other projects and i and i see that that will be taken on by you know licensed regulated entities that have some sort of a license to to provide those kind of payment services to the marketplace um other question i see here is i guess t plus one and thanks eric for the link to sort of the university of cypress paper there's a lot of uh there are a number of digital euro digital sort of initiative papers out there and i encourage you to sort of look at them because there's there's quite every every week there seems to be several of them and i and i know that there there's always sort of people that are publishing points of view and organizations that are publishing their points of view bis is very active in this area many central banks are very active in this area and also the academic institutions that publish in sort of their perspective on cdc i think this will be an area of study um you know for for many years um and there's going to be plenty of uh of some sort of great thought leadership that comes out of the universities in the near future um the one thing i would say as well as that this is a very multidisciplinary field so this is really there's a there is a technology component of course to this and this there's quite a lot to step into it from a technology point of view but there this is very multidisciplinary looking at macro micro economics you're looking at theory you're looking at strategy you're looking in geopolitics you're looking at all sorts of different dimensions and i think that's really what captures the essence of this topic and i think we're you know we're the strength of having these multiple multidisciplinary teams is really going to stand out and make us to sort of uh look at this in a much more clever way um there's a question about uh bitcoin as legal tender and is european in about having bitcoin rather than cdc right here could be developed i think from many central banks um don't want to to devolve that responsibility fiscal policy objectives to an external force um and they want to be in ultimate control i mean that's a prudent sort of uh sort of central bank that would do that and i think that's also going to play out i think in terms of many of the different cbc initiatives the more i mean this is a policy decision this is a government decision as well we're also working with regulators to help service structure the right regulation law changes in law and what policy decisions need to be made in order to sort of even implement this cbc to go all the way to sort of something where you don't have that control and it's basically sort of supply and other types of macroeconomic implications would emerge by by sort of devolving that to an external force so i think it's interesting but um i don't see that happening very often in many different geography as well so um that's i think that's it for the questions um how we do that time two minutes so there's no more questions feel free to pop them in if there's anything else um i just want to make a couple of closing remarks uh there's this is a very fast moving space there's a lot of a lot of work being done globally uh more more so i encourage you those that are interested in this to this topic to please reach out to the folks that are that are like myself and david myself and others that are actively working in this area um and let us know if you're you know who can share ideas and share and collaborate i one thing i would say is that in this in this whole space that it's been incredibly uh collaborative working experience um almost a semi-academic environment for for lack of a better description and i think i'm very encouraged by that there's a strong willingness to share uh to explore open source ideas to open openly develop new concepts and new ideas i think that's really what's driving a lot of the developments because of this uh open openness and the nature of this topic um in many central banks look at this as a as a public private partnership it's almost a social contract between government and people um and the economy um so it has a much broader um you know a social dimension and implication i think than than other topics that we that we look at uh and on that note i think it's it's one of the most exciting things to be areas to be working in and to be involved in so encourage you to continue to sort of you know have that interest do the research you know keep an eye on what's going on and get ready for sort of innovation that's going to be coming our way you know in minnow and on that note thank you very much for your time and um if there's any more questions please feel free to reach out to me directly um and have a good evening thank you