Watch Quant’s Founder and CEO, Gilbert Verdian, and industry, academic and government leaders discuss how to best adopt Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) at the Financial Times’ Crypto and Digital Assets Summit 2022.

Recorded live at the Financial Times’ Crypto and Digital Assets Summit 2022: watch Quant’s Founder and CEO, Gilbert Verdian, along with industry, academic and government leaders discuss how to best adopt central bank digital currencies.

The debate around how CBDCs will work in practice has raged for many months. Many have questioned how central banks can adopt scalable, secure and operationally robust distributed ledger technology.   

Gilbert Verdian discussed this pertinent subject along with the policy implications, the impact on consumers and risks with Charlotte Hogg, CEO Europe, Visa, Timothy Lane, Deputy Governor, Bank of Canada, and Thomas Hardjono, CTO of Connection Science and Technical Director of Trust- Data Consortium, MIT. This lively session was moderated by Gillian Tett, Chair of the Editorial Board and Editor-at-Large U.S., Financial Times. Below we share highlights and a video from the session.  

CBDCs won’t displace retail banks 
In explaining how to best implement CBDCs, Gilbert said its new structure would need to be informed by public policy. He says, “CBDCs are here. I don’t think anyone can argue against that. We’re seeing a practical policy-led view of CBDCs; every jurisdiction has different requirements. The bank does not want consumers and businesses to call them and ask about a payment delay or some issue. The central banks are just not geared up for that…This relationship must stay with the (retail) banks and the consumer.” 

CBDCs can complement existing payment systems 
Gilbert explains how CBDCs can improve money movement, “our perspective is that CBDCs are not here to completely turn the financial system upside down. They’re here to complement and become an overlay to the existing system.”

Conquering fraud, once and for all 
Gilbert also weighed in on how CBDCs can prevent fraud using built-in controls. He adds, “from our perspective, fraud has been an everlasting issue that we’ve been trying to tackle as an industry. Central bank digital currencies will allow us to tackle fraud once and for all. By having these controls built-in from a policy requirement into the technology, we can eliminate the risks that consumers and businesses face.” 

Standardisation will enable consumer choice 
Gilbert described how the standardisation of technology will open new benefits of CBDCs to consumers. He explains, “consumers and businesses want choice (for payments). They don’t want to be forced to use one single thing.”  

“The way we see this evolving is like the evolution of the internet…Working in collaboration on standards, we have the ISO standard- TC 307, that I helped establish in 2015.  57 countries are working on that solely to standardise DLT. There is also an initiative called ODAP, Open Development Asset Protocol with the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF), which is a way to interoperate domestic networks to become cross-border and borderless in a seamless way.”

​It allows your money to roam with you anywhere in the world: the same way your mobile roams…It works across networks, protocols and at any frequency. Your money is going to have these same abilities with the security, privacy and all the benefits built in.

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“Our perspective is that CBDCs are not here to completely turn the financial system upside down. They’re here to complement and become an overlay to the existing system.”

Gilbert Verdian
Founder and CEO
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