As the world has moved to a digital age, the one thing that has been left behind is money. Watch our recent short film produced with Fintech Alliance in which Quant CEO Gilbert Verdian and Martin Hargreaves, our Chief Product Officer, share their thoughts on the future of money: central bank digital currencies and programmable payments with tokenised deposits.
As a society, we now operate digitally. Advancement of technology has enabled us to maintain a global connectedness, but money appears to have been left behind. While some elements have been digitised, with the introduction of mobile banking and automated, real-time payments, money is not yet truly digital. We see examples of this in the process of making a contactless payment, which is still heavily reliant on back-end systems that are often manual, inefficient and time-consuming.
By making money purely digital, in line with society’s needs, we can remove friction, increase efficiency and provide a new, smarter way to use money. But what will this look like for consumers?
When we think of digital money, we often think of cryptocurrencies, but they cannot be defined as money. They have been designed to serve as currencies, but they don’t yet fulfil the central functions of money in that they lack a stable value and have no unit of account.
A far more promising initiative is central bank digital currencies, a new form of digital currency that is set to transform the future of digital money, with an estimated 93% of central banks around the world already exploring the concept. This figure is indicative of the huge potential of CBDCs, which are expected to transform how money works and how its infrastructure should be built.
But there is still a way to go. Although we’re heading towards a cashless society, today’s digital money is not as sophisticated and smart as it needs to be. With the introduction of cryptocurrencies and private currencies, the industry is at a crossroads – it remains unclear what consumers will be paying with in the future. CBDCs and programmable payments using tokenised deposits, through a concept we refer to as real-time tokenised banking, promise to provide a solution to this fragmented ecosystem, through automation and programmability that gives people greater control over their money, without having to manually touch it.
As momentum builds, Quant is pioneering the transition to CBDCs and programmable payments. We started out by establishing clear standards for the industry, then building the technology to create and launch a CBDC platform where all central banks can practically test the theoretical concepts of a CBDC and determine what it means for them.
But we know that transforming the financial system is complex and challenging, which is why Quant is making the leap to digital currencies seamless and easy to integrate, by providing the infrastructure to test CBDC and programmable payment applications.
How Quant can help
