Unified ledgers: opportunities and legal challenges

Instant payments systems are proliferating rapidly, and many central banks are working hard on interlinking them to enable quick, efficient cross-border payments. However, while IPS can provide extremely rapid, low-cost payments, they are not immune to fraud and erroneous payments. Given the speed of settlement, these problems can be even more difficult to resolve than they are for other payments systems.   Petia Niederländer, head of payments, risk monitoring and financial literacy at Oesterreichische Nationalbank, and Cian OMurhu, managing director and head of strategic transformation office at Swift, join Lewis McLellan, editor of OMFIF’s Digital Monetary Institute, to discuss the technical infrastructure required to address these issues, how they are being implemented and what work still needs to be done.

Real-world asset tokenisation is accelerating, particularly within private distributed ledger technology platforms like R3's Corda. But Richard Brown, R3’s chief technology officer, believes that the future of financial market infrastructure lies in the convergence of private networks like Corda and public networks like Ethereum and Solana. He joins Lewis McLellan, editor of OMFIF’s Digital Monetary Institute, to discuss the opportunity that DLT presents for an overhaul of financial market infrastructure where the openness, liquidity and composability of public networks is combined with the regulatory confidence offered by private networks.

Paul Blustein, author of King Dollar: The Past and Future of the World's Dominant Currency, joins OMFIF to discuss his latest book and thoughts on why the dollar has been, continues to be and will remain the world's dominant currency.  He discusses why the euro and renminbi are not viable alternatives, whether there is a role for cryptocurrencies and stablecoins, if excess US use of financial sanctions could weaken the dollar's global role and what other landmines might lie ahead, including American dysfunction. 

OMFIF’s 2024 survey of central banks found that, while three-quarters of respondents are continuing their plans to issue central bank digital currencies, one-third have delayed their timelines. However, this was before the change in US government and the decision not to pursue CBDCs, instead prioritising digital assets. A follow-up OMFIF survey revealed that this development has encouraged some central banks outside the US to move in the opposite direction and accelerate their CBDC plans. Wolfram Seidemann, chief executive officer of Giesecke+Devrient Currency Technology, joins John Orchard, chairman of OMFIF’s Digital Monetary Institute, to discuss why CBDCs should be issued sooner rather than later, how public sector payment rails can boost private sector innovation and what the future financial system might look like.

Amelia Santos-Paulino, chief of investment research at the United Nations Trade and Development's investment and enterprise division, joins OMFIF to discuss some of the key priorities in sustainability for UNTAD in 2025. She considers the space for trade and investment flows in international climate discussions, particularly in the face of recent elections. She also discusses the critical growth sectors associated with sustainable trade and the opportunities and challenges faced by emerging markets in this area.

Max Castelli, head of strategy for sovereign institutions, and Philipp Salman, director of strategy for sovereign institutions at UBS Asset Management, join Yara Aziz, economist at OMFIF, to discuss how sovereign investors are adapting their strategies for 2025. They explore US President Trump’s policies, the outlook for the dollar and the impact of artificial intelligence on the future of the Magnificent Seven stocks.

Discourse on the rewiring of payments and financial markets has been dominated in 2024 by talk of unified ledgers. The technical promises and challenges this architecture entails are gradually becoming better understood, but before the prototypes can become reality, the legal challenges must be fully explored. Natalie Lewis, partner at Travers Smith, joins Lewis McLellan, editor of OMFIF’s Digital Monetary Institute, to discuss what the legal implications of unified ledgers will be.

Wendy Teleki, head of the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative at the World Bank, joins Arunima Sharan, senior economist at OMFIF's Economic and Monetary Policy Institute, to discuss how the We Finance Code is tackling the $1.7tn financing gap facing women entrepreneurs. They explore We-Fi's work across 80 countries and examine how supporting women-led businesses creates positive social impact through improved education, employment and economic empowerment.

Tokenisation is frequently discussed as a means of improving the efficiency of existing financial markets, but the technology may offer the chance to create entirely new types of economic activity. The immense reach of distributed ledger technology-based tokens makes them a vector of greater inclusion to types of markets previously inaccessible to the general public. Additionally, the collaborative decision-making facilitated by tokenisation can encourage new types of co-operation between competitors to achieve shared aims. Dominik Talebi, managing director of Global Trade Finance, joins Lewis McLellan, editor of OMFIF’s Digital Monetary Institute, to discuss the new economic paradigm that tokenisation is already beginning to offer.

Yara Aziz, economist at OMFIF’s Economic and Monetary Policy Institute, speaks with Ashleigh Lee, co-lead secretariat of the City of London Corporation’s Transition Finance Market Review, to discuss the findings of the Transition Finance Market Review report. They explore the challenges and opportunities in scaling transition finance, strategies to prevent greenwashing and the global collaboration required to drive decarbonisation.