 Hi, my name is Dasa Greenwood. I'm a scientist here at the MIT Media Lab, focused on the intersection of law and technology. This summer my research is focused on creating the first completely automated federally-chartered credit union as an entity type. There have certainly been credit unions that use digital systems. They all do. The issue is they use too many. There are systems for your monthly statements. There are systems for auditing and accounting. There are systems for account management. There are systems for governance. Lots of systems. What doesn't exist for credit unions or for any legal entity that I'm aware of right now is a complete integrated, holistic, automated digital architecture. What we aim to do this summer is create the first completely online legal entity. There's three main compelling value propositions for us to be focusing on building this prototype of an automated credit union. The first one is that it's possible by looking at the statute, the regulations, other guidance from the regulator, to actually pull out a very complete set of requirements, of constraints, of basically system descriptions of what a healthy and legitimate credit union entity type would look like, how it would function, what the relationships would be, the parameters within which it would operate, even an enumerated list of all the pre-approved types of transactions and other business activities that it is allowed to do. It is a heavily regulated entity type, being a type of financial institution. It is completely contained within its own set of laws governing credit unions. It's not a sub-part of banks or a sub-part of other financial institutions. There's a nice, crisp, uniquely important, valid, official, if you will, set of requirements that we can drive from the law. The second compelling reason is that we believe that U.S. federally chartered credit unions and apparently, this is held in common with credit unions in other countries as well, as a not-for-profit entity, as an entity where the members, the account holders are the owners, as an entity that exists to serve the interests of the members, almost like a collective, is uniquely well-positioned to be a steward of people's personal data and individual identity in the digital age. As we look at ways that we can apply the rules that define and govern credit unions to not just physical artifact that you put into a safe deposit box or U.S. dollar currency that you would put into account, but also other types of assets that would be empowered to hold and manage for people, we think that without really any material change of existing laws, just applying the law to modern property types of digital assets, that it is the perfect shape and role of an entity that would be trustworthy as a steward of people's personal data. This is because the interests of the credit union as fiduciaries are to serve the interests of the members, not external shareholders or other market pressures. It's literally aligned to members and the aggregate. The third reason why we think a credit union prototype to create the first automated entity is really worth our effort and our focus, our time, is because the regulator and the industry have almost a predisposition, I would call it, in favor of promoting people to organize and deploy new credit unions for their communities. There's a little list, a checklist that is available if you are workers within a corporation or you have a type neighborhood association or some other common bond to make it easy for you to put together a credit union to serve the depository and other financial needs of your members. This is great because when you look at the attributes of a kind of prototype that can scale, one of the things that's important is something where there's lots of them and where they're renewing and refreshing themselves on a regular basis. There is a direct path for not just migration of existing credit unions to modern methods but also for, and this is very powerful, the creation of the new credit unions of a year, two years, ten and more years from now to be born truly digital with a automated complete coherent architecture that can be automated, easier to govern, more agile and adaptive to make the most of protection and in the best value of people's assets that are deposited there, they're digital and other assets, and also that can be overseen and can be basically examined for safety and soundness and audits by regulators and others. Having a coherent unified integrated digital entity can literally make a lot of the existing costs, confusion and uncertainty significantly limited in some cases go away and can open up whole new terrains of possibility for having ever better adapted, higher value, more customized lines of service and business for the members and the broader ecologies and markets that the credit unions touch. So the automated credit union prototype project and what we hope will become pilots is I'd say really so far the most compelling research project from law.mit.edu. It ties together the threads of a new deal on data and systems that will let people own and control the personal data like our open personal data store and some other encryption projects along with analytics and the big data statistical modeling and predictive techniques that we've been doing with legal data sets and contract formation and of course just the basic idea of corporate law of the law of creating an entity that can be measured as to whether or not it's achieving its purpose and how well aligned and on track it is for success metrics. It's very much an expression of what Professor Pentland talks about in his book Social Physics when he describes these digital entities in new types of markets and cities and environments that operate based on being data driven and that can be very, very quickly, very intelligently adaptive to the needs people have now and can begin to anticipate through predictions and simulations the needs that are emerging. Very efficient, very different. It's critical to begin prototyping and getting experience with these types of entities sooner rather than later and our intention is to work with stakeholders to reach out to the regulators, to the credit union industry, to consumers, to product and service providers and to other stakeholders, researchers to join together and help provide feedback and creative design sessions to make the most of an opportunity to creatively prototype and build a good example of what an automated entity, an automated credit union in this case could be to achieve the potential and then deploy the potential. The key takeaway that I hope everybody will remember is that this cluster of projects that we're working on through law.mit.edu under the framework of Professor Pentland's Human Dynamics Lab are intended to get ahead of the curve so that the law is not continually chasing and falling behind technology but instead MIT can provide at least one more bastion where we can look over the horizon and we can begin prototyping, building, experimenting with and exploring analytics and dynamic types of systems, automated entities that are absolutely coming but before we have to address them in realities that we can begin to anticipate and also build out the kind of future we all want to inhabit.