In 2009 Paul Volcker famously said that ‘The only thing useful banks have invented in 20 years is the ATM’. One decade later banks accepted Tech into their lives and business model with some re-positioning themselves as technology firms. Most of this has been, however, in response to the innovation and pressure coming from the outside:
It's abundantly clear that the industrial giants of today are the Big Tech and it's therefore reasonable to expect more disruption of banking from these innovation-driven outsiders. The faster and more nimble banks will adapt & partner up with the disruptors, the others will see their margins shrink as value is increasingly captured by the software providers (or even passed on back to the customers via lower fees!).
In order for the Financiers of tomorrow to stay relevant they need to be much more tech savvy and open minded when it comes to adopting new business models.
Enter Crypto. The notorious forbidden word in banking for over 10 years. What began as a manifesto for anarchists and a payment facilitation tool for illicit purposes (just as the Internet at its infancy btw) and a platform to easily raise capital (e.g. regulatory arbitrage), has matured into a market worth $500bn+ with thousands of millionaires; hundreds of bn in trading volume and billions in revenue; hundreds of businesses and investment funds, some of them being the Big Tech, corporate and central banks.
Does Crypto matter? Is it just a playground for speculators? Will it get 'shut down'? Will it become the new global monetary system? The answer is 'it depends'. It depends on the timing of your question and what you want that question to really mean.
Imagine: -> you do a securitisation transaction with a bank / provide complex collateral -> you borrow on the back of it and make an international payment -> you do FX & place proceeds into fixed income instruments across 10+ different providers -> you provide capital to a selection of funds to generate and hedge your exposure Think of the fees and the timing involved and how cost prohibitive it might be. Now imagine that the cryptocurrency ecosystem allows you to do all of this with just a few clicks in a few minutes with less than $100 of transactional fees with no counterparty risk! This is what's possible today and $14bn sits in these contracts as AUM with $72bn traded over the last year.
This market evolves at the speed of light with, growing 100%+ MoM and this is the market that will be competing with us. We'll help you stay up to speed so that you can capitalise on this market and its products when you're ready.