 Now I'd like to shift us up to talking about a business level use case that has really emerged over the last year, and that is that of central bank digital currencies. There's probably no topic that's hotter amongst central bankers these days, with so many banks announcing pilots announcing research projects organizations of all sorts that are involved in this announcing different different initiatives, and looking to the underlying technologies that have we've been using in the enterprise blockchain space, not just for inspiration but to actually build into play on. So I'm very happy here to be hosting a panel with two very distinguished guests, if I can bring them on screen. So, the first is her Excellency Siray Che, who is the assistant governor for the National Bank of Cambodia, and as well as sub Nendu Mohanti, who is the chief fintech officer for the monetary authority of Singapore. These are two organizations that have been pioneers in this space, who have had research projects and now deployments built on this technology. So I'm really looking forward to getting to know their projects better to share more of that with you but also start to really dig in on what's needed to to meet this challenge so why don't I pause and Siray. Could you share with the audience just a little bit more about what Cambodia has done with the National Bank of Cambodia has built and and you know that what what you build upon and what success you've had with it. Thank you, Brian, and good morning, good afternoon, good evening to everyone in the audience. I'm very glad to represent the minority here, the women speakers and also long white. I am assistant governor of the National Bank of Cambodia and recently the NBC introduced a project called project back home, which is the backbone payment system. Now, I think you refer to it as CBDC. You can call it whatever you want but to us is a backbone payment system. So, this system use hyper ledger Iroha. It's a system that we co developed with a Japanese company calls to a midsuit back got how it works is that it is it's provided a universal applications for everyone in the public to download. Once downloaded, they have to register themselves with one of the member bank in back home. And so they choose the registration with the member bank. And then they can top up the wallet with the so the application itself is a wallet, and then they can top up the money into the wallet by sending money from the existing bank account. And if they don't have a bank account, they can top up with cash at any bank branches or at any agent. So a banking agent for many of you who's not familiar it's it's actually kind of like a human ATM, where their, their only function is to disperse cash to whoever needed and it's very popular in developing countries. And it's required less resources, particularly in terms of electricity so if you go to remote area where you don't have, you know, stable supply of electricity is plugging an ATM machine could require a lot so. So anyone can go to an agent and top up their wallet, and one the money in is in the wallet they can send it to any other wallet holder, or to any of the bank account holder and vice versa. The second feature of this background project is the interoperability part where people who don't have a background wallet, they can still use their existing banking application and send money to any other bank account holder. Through the backbone, the background backbone. And so this is where into interoperability is created. So far we have about 100,000 download of the wallets but in terms of the people that we reached and indirectly use back on, we reach about 5 million users. And so this, this wallet exists both in US dollars, where Cambodia is a dollar rise economy, and also in real, which is the local currency. That's, that's fascinating. Great. Why don't I pass the mic to some men do something to could you tell us more about what the monetary authority of Singapore has done in this space and some of the recent announcements that that you've made. Good morning. Good afternoon to all the audience today. And it's always a great opportunity to speak on a open source platform, which we truly believe as a simple bank we always believe that more open source is better for the community and what you've done is remarkable over the last few years in getting getting from all of us from this questionable that blockchain is looking for a problem to solve. I think now you have changed the gear a lot. And now it is a real solution for real problems in what we do with things around us. So MS started its own journey about understanding the technology in 2016 through our own experiment called project open. Open is a, as a man given to a program where we bought different DLT platform together, and we took a use case, which central banks are comfortable with this call payments, and then try to implement this technology and understand can we make it better than what we have today. And this project went to a five phase process over three years. Now it's going to 2020 and we told ourselves that we want to stop this experiment in 2019 last year. And we promised to everybody that it will, it will not stay as an experiment forever, it will go into production grade something. We didn't know that something what it means in 2016, which is still experimenting. Well, I'm not going to bore your audience with what happened open because this is widely publicized reports out there. Essentially just to summarize we spend time from a policy standpoint of a technology understanding point of view, trying to see is there possibility to make things better than it stands today and we kind of came out of the whole exercise with one clear outcome. Yes, the DLT platform truly can solve the settlement issue. And how do you go about it, that there is a play for a wholesome CBDC, while, while shared will not acknowledge the her as a retail CBDC, and she will constantly pitch it as a, as a payment solution I think she's rightfully rightfully done that and does as a right position from her context. But there is a play for retail CBDC which I will come later. Let's talk about the wholesome CBDC. Yes, with the wholesome CBDC construct with the DLT construct that is a possible opportunity to redesign the whole ledger system, especially when you're settling across the border. Now I will switch back to the back and forth on different experience here. Now, same time 2016 2017, we did a almost identical a parallel experiment of taking the existing infrastructure we had in Singapore, which is a faster payment system, and to connect to an equivalent system in Thailand, which they have their equivalent of faster payment system. And we see whether we can connect them cross border and see where it goes. It took us three years to connect those two system we went live this this year. And there are a few outcomes we saw that first thing we bought down the cost of transfer between Singapore and Thailand from average 10 to 15% to down to 3%. There's a significant reduction. Remember, I'm sending money through that trusted banking rails, not through a remittance system which is outside the banking system, if at all, but they're within regulatory space, not to normal public rails like a faster payment system. Now, we still are stuck in a 3% 5% cost, and primarily because of two things, effects and the settlement cost. That's where the beauty of a wholesale currency plus a DLT based shared ledger could make it make a big difference. And if we can collectively bring down the 3% cost to a sub dollar cost for transfer. I think, though, I'm going to pitch to the hyper ledger community, help us to get that, and you're truly contributed a significant inclusion agenda, when bringing down the cost of cross border, the cross border cost. And to do that, if it takes a DLT based architecture, you need to text the wholesale CVTC, it takes a whole new way of settling. I think we should go and do it. I think that's where we believe the real opportunity lies. So that's the DLT wholesale currency. Now shifting the gear a little bit on Singapore again. The reason I talked about the two system because we finished the experiment, we saw the real result of connecting the standard tech stack, we still had a 3% problem. Let's talk about how you can solve the 3% so we as the end of the project to win the success of the experiment, and ended up in creating an industry architecture or a company called Partier jointly launched by DBS, JP Morgan, TMSA, and they created an industry utility, a blockchain based platform, which enables participant around the world to transact on real time using different currencies, digital currencies, commercial banks, digital currency. Now the idea behind this that can we create a shared ledger for a multi currency construct and help to automatically settle transactions, and that platform is what Partier is bringing. So in the downstream that can also help design smart contracts. If there's a defy based use case, they can also facilitate that. But what I'm trying to summarize here that this whole experiment ended up in a production grade, a commercial enterprise for Partier, trying to solve a real issue around transfer settlement on multi currencies cost structures which can be significantly made better than what is time today. So as Partier as an outcome, same time, we also saw just a minute, we also saw that we kind of saw a massive revolution in Singapore in terms of number of blockchain companies coming and solving the issues in different ways. We have used 200 blockchain companies Singapore alone, they occupy 15% of our fintech portfolio so such a massive growth has come in the space, and then as an outcome of that they're solving issues around trade finance. They're solving issues around our own exchanges settlement processes. In fact, there are many examples today in Singapore where we have used the LPS platform for bond issuance and this class of issuance. So there are a whole set of commercial enterprise coming through, not only by fintech also by mainstream banks, the EBS and etc, which clearly shows that blockchain has become mainstream. And once it has become mainstream, this technology is no more a fun. It's a real serious platform to think about. And I wish that the hyperledger community can continue to play in this space and help us to solve real problems. Wow, that's a great message that then do thanks. Let me actually pivot this that observation back to Surrey. So what role did open source software play in choosing a platform for project.com. And you know how important was it that hyperledger Roja was open source. And does that play an ongoing role as you think about evolving that platform is the fact that it's open source relevant. It's getting a bit technical. I, I may not be able to answer it perfectly but my understanding from my IT is that it's the reason why we selected I Roja in the first place was because it was written in a language that our team could understand and which was the Java language. So that was a very important part in our selections. But I, so that's that's probably what I can answer from a technical perspective but I just want to pick up from what some men do mentions about CBDC. If we, if we, if we think that currency and money are interchangeable term, then money by definition have three function which is a medium of exchange a unit of account, and a store of value. So when we introduced back on we didn't intend to reinvent money in itself, because in terms of the store of value, you know, we're happy with what one real represent one US dollars represent we were happy with the store of value but we wanted to reinvent the way people make payment. And that's why we insist on calling it a payment system. If you look at if you want to recreate the concept of money that would mean that people can use the money that the digital form that back on introduced to earn money. Right to save and to lend as well, because that says money is about, and this is not the, the, the, the area that we wanted to venture into because it would imply a lot of complication for monetary policies and others. So we want to stick to the fact that the reason why we make it electronic. It's because we want to make payment easier we want to make cross border payment easier. And that's the only reason why we stick to background payment system but in terms of calling it a central bank digital currency. There are some some features in in back on that could be. I mean people can can call it central bank digital currency technology wise it is, but legal wise from a legal perspective it is not so technology is because it is peer to peer. It is because it's introduced by the central bank so anyone who want to transact through the background platform must first exchange their fiat money with the central bank against the digital form of it. And the, the thing with it is that we only do this kind of transaction with financial institutions we don't deal directly with the public. And so the central banks don't have any liability direct liability to the public. And in a way it sort of distinguish this CBDC feature from the payment feature that we were mentioning. I see. No it's the term CBDC has been used very widely I think the the China's central bank digital currency takes a very different kind of view of what one would call a CBDC. I think the association people have is, you know, to see a government of any sort, whether it's you know the US or or European or or or Cambodia. You know, saying here's a technology platform. And it's a technology platform for exchanging units of value right is an extraordinary thing. And typically that's thought of as the thing that's left to private the private sector left to, you know, people like Swift or that something like that right so I think it's really, really interesting to see a tech, a government take a very forward kind of position on this. And so I think that's, that's that's what's been wrapped up in CBDC. I think even if it's not quite a digital currency, but I think it's intended to be to be, you know, an honorific you know it'd be to be something to speak highly of so. And now that I remember I want to mention the reason why we select this hyper ledger or peer to peer for the system. And this is because when you look at how payment system payment and settlement is done in a banking system is that the central bank will hold a centralized system and all settlement bank settlement will go through the central bank system. And every member banks will then have to have a settlement account a credit lines with the bank in case with the central bank in case you know they can't settle. And so there's a lot of liquidity management required from member bank to be a member of the central clearinghouse. And so what we're trying to bring in the problem with our fragmented system was that we have so many type of institutions we have the payment service provider which we regulate more like a technology provider. And we have banks which we regulate as banks, and then we have micro finance institution which are the regulation is that much lesser extent. And so because we wanted to bring everyone onto the same platform. One way we could do this is that bring the payment service provider who provide wallet on to the central clearinghouse, which means that they will have to comply with the same liquidity management rules as banks and that's the whole purpose of making that the buy payment cheaper than banks because the regulatory compliance cost. And so what we come up with with that okay let how about peer to peer which is the payment service provider don't have to be a member of the central clearinghouse as long as they have their back home credit as long as their user has back home credit they can transfer to anyone they want because it's peer to peer. It won't go to the central system and we won't have to monitor their liquidity positions on a daily basis on hourly basis. And in a ways I think it's very important for us that how you know this new system can contribute to bringing everyone on the same platform and and also reduce risk. It reduces risk it's essentially continuously self auditing in a way or self monitoring. I think that's one of the key, the key advantages the opportunity to collapse a couple of layers of the stack that that typically we have there or reduce some intermediaries. Recent projects that have launched from MAS that you've been involved in have spoken to MCDDCs this concept of having a common ledger for a number of different central bank digital currencies or units of payment. Do you think that's a that's a trend that will grow I mean do you think at some point like like majority of the world's central bank currencies will be on a small number of common ledgers. Do you think I mean what's what is the shape of kind of this base look like over time if some of the these projects are successful. Sure, I think that's the genesis of that definitely on boobins and experiment Canada need on Jasper. I think they all talked about ledger which can be shared. So in a multi ledger construct multi currency multi ledger construct definitely is the way forward. And if indeed the future of cross border settlement will be multi currency. I think there's a need to think about a shared ledger center banks can work with. And then that ledger doesn't need a debit credit and whole settlement going between different countries, can they share something among themselves, and that can be used and that's what Project Dunbar of the IS bank of investment in Singapore have is doing. And that exactly is trying to build a model where which central banks can think about a shared ledger multi currency multi CBDC ledger, and then use that infrastructure as a service as a service. I want to be very, very particular about that as a service, then where different provider can use that service to do the commercial bank and use that service to do the payment transfer. So, so the operational resiliency remains decoupled, and only this particular ledger becomes a service where it can be used to settle among domestic currencies and hence make the process easier. So your big question is, yes, is that a trend, and I, if I'm not mistaken, and please, if I quote a wrong number, the 100 plus experiments around this whole CBDC piece going around in different shapes and sizes, I think, I think that is that is the trend. I think in my perspective, central banks have, have, have, have kind of came a long way to, to, to kind of reconcile that there is a play for a DLT based shared ledger as a way to redesign your settlement system, whether for domestic settlement for securities and payment, or for international settlement of securities and payment. I think that's kind of strengthening conclusions. Well, what, what is this paint for institutions that are traditional intermediaries I'm thinking of, you know, obviously swift but but what about the BIS, I mean, what, I mean, not not that I'm asking you to speculate on their futures but if trend lines continue what what might we expect is that this is still an infrastructure, it's still an infrastructure play, the central bank will play the governance role. I think they have to play the governance role when it's not is a permission ledger let me put this way. So it's not a permission, permission less system. So, so I think the role of governance will not go away. Yeah, it still remains. It is the infrastructure until infrastructure becomes far more atomic in nature. Still, so still room for some intermediaries to try to make it easier to integrate the system. Safety, safety soundness will remain that, at least for, at least for now. Right, right. You cannot say in future what will happen but at least my perspective is that they'll be tech shift, but governance will become central to that. Interesting. We had one question which came about just somebody really curious about which DLT platforms are used underneath some of these different solutions I think we established that underneath project back Kong is hyper ledger a Roja, which is cool. And I think that I am as the with project you've been you did kind of a bake off between fabric and ethereum and quorum or quarter, sorry, and quarter at the time. And I know you've continued to research all three of these. Can you talk a little bit about what what you know of the different different differences in your evaluation. And I suppose the issue that whether whatever difference exist, please solve the interoperability issue is almost a reverse that you may have a differences. But can I simultaneously check with the different platform for interoperability perspective, affordable to talk to each other so in fact it's not doesn't matter whether that differences, but as a central bank we expect them to do certain core principle of interoperability. So differences may still that but at least when they talk to each other, there was a there was interoperability was tested as part of the program. Having said that, I've been in the defense of the promotion of hyper ledger. We are. I just want to bring to your audience that hopefully by the end of this month. We have announced announced a massive, but as the biggest hackathon ever done in the space of a retail CBDC, where we got economist and policymaker to actually put that problem statement, and hyper ledger is going to be one of our key partner to provide that infrastructure and service so that we get the best brain to solve this issues and my sense is that as an outcome of that huge experiment, we may actually provide a real case for many emerging market, many countries who can't afford traditional faster payment system infrastructure, even making their own currency, one system efficient, they may find retail CBDC with this infrastructure and a compelling argument for them to switch. In Singapore, I may not have a compelling argument because I can move money between two bank account at zero cost at in three clicks, but there are countries which still needs a lot of infrastructure investment and they can leapfrog like Cambodia. Well, we're very eager to collaborate with you on the hackathon. And as you know, you know, both hyper ledger fabric and hyper ledger Bezu have been you are being used in pilots out there around CBDC isn't obviously a Roja to be great to see a I mean, again, national payment systems not CBDC apologies, sorry. But yeah, it'll be really great to see how we might, you know, tap into the innovation and energy that's in our ecosystem, and to apply to these big challenges. Sorry, Brian, I was at what one thing I want to say that the whole infrastructure, the one sector, which is truly taken off big time switching the infrastructure the trade finance piece. You go and ask any trade finance companies, any bank which is doing trade finance that you ask one question what technology architect you want to shift, it will be a blockchain based architecture. So that one sector within financial sector has really taken off is the trade finance piece. No, that's that's long been a big deployment. I can use case for for hyper ledger technologies and and very big in China as well that's that's the source of a lot of their, their work will hear a bit more from the China Construction Bank in a keynote on Thursday so really looking forward to that. Let's see. So, one of the questions that has emerged in central bank digital currencies is obviously how KYC and ML processes are affected by it. And there's some who think are asking, could central banks be a way to also get to a new approach to digital identity. You know, there's a lot of technologies in the blockchain space for kind of reinventing how digital identity might work you might be familiar with self sovereign identity. I have either of you seen that come up as a as a use case and what are your some thoughts about what happens over the next year or two with that. Yes. So you want me to go straight. So, let me let me contact this question is a very good question and thanks for asking this question to us. We recently did an internal study on how the future of finance will look like out of the three or four things which kind of landed with we think there's a huge future of finance around decentralized finance. And one of the code and to to to get there. One of the key component is identity, the digital identity. And here is the challenge because there is a to there are two schools of thought in some context like Singapore, India, there's a massive push to build national digital ID programs, whether for corporates or individuals. Countries is almost reverse. That could be an identity run by private sector self sovereign identity and different construct like that. In either case, there's a need to have a robust agreed digital identity construct representing a company or an individual. So that's given, if you want to go in that space, because typically defy will need as a smart contract, we need two or three things if not it must have a trusted ID. We must have a codified regulation recognized by the legal framework in the country, and of course the underlying architecture that the digital currency which powers them. And so, so the so the so the discussion we are having now is not only recognizing this idea within the country, can it be recognized outside the country. We would need to start the debate, not only for for the digital finance use case, also smart contracts in this case, also for the case of even doing a simple KYC based on digital products. So digital KYC based on digital identity is being discussed, what really has to come up strongly is countries who prefer self sovereign IDs or some kind of the decentralized ID. So they come up with the good ideas in use case and I have seen some use case, but they're very designed for a particular condition like refugees. Use case those kind of those kind of use cases but not at a national or at a level where a decentralized ID is being developed, but definitely is a very critical component to be discussed and sorted out. Right. Do you think project back home serves as kind of a gateway to doing other national digital identity projects or tackling other ID related use cases for Cambodia. Yeah, we were currently exploring this because in Cambodia the way it works is that everyone has a national ID number, and it is registered with our Ministry of Interior. We've got a big database of, you know, of the people there. And so what we're trying to do is that when people register on the background platform, can we access to those database and verify the people immediately against official database and get it moving faster. Currently we have too many layers it's it's tiered layers because we want to promote financial inclusion so if you just download enter your phone number and take a picture of yourself and your ID it give you a certain level of access. But if you want to increase the amount that you're able to transfer across, then you need to physically be present at the bank branch where they do you know these conventional KYC and we think that you know in this day and age when it is prevalent. It is best that we limit contacts and so now we're working with the Cambodian data exchange center where we can which which gathered all the pool all the government data and see whether we can access directly to the the the ID database. But this is what we we hope can can be rolled out soon we also exploring cross border. Again, when we were talking I mean it's it's good to have is digital currency that you can send across border and I think in fact, this is probably one of the most useful case of digitalizing your currency in the first place is that you allow cross border faster, but that's assumed that the other country would also have the same system in place. And in our case we actually try to connect the background platform which is a which is a DLT base with a conventional platform from a Malaysian commercial bank, Maybank so there's there's a lot of challenges, particularly in the digital identity. But we hope we can overcome it and launch it within this year. I think interconnecting interconnections between central banks and the payment rails interconnection, you know on a global scale I mean this is something I know is on the minds of folks who are working on the interoperability initiatives at at hyper ledger. How do we make that as seamless as efficient so we can bring the cost down some Nendo to your point you want to bring it really below $1, which I think it's fabulous as a way to expand. I access to that. And I think the Bacong project's a great example as well of expanding access beyond the people who are part of the traditional banking system. So, I want to thank both of my guests again Harris, Excellency sir H a from the National Bank of Cambodia, so then do I want to from the monetary authority of Singapore thank you both for an amazing panel on the application of these technologies to what is probably the use case at the top of the pyramid in the financial system so thank you both.