Public-Private Roundtables

SME Financing via Programmable Money and Tokenisation
Hosted by Bank of Thailand

Bank of Thailand (BOT) initiated the Business Prototype Development Project for CBDCs in June 2020, marking the first time the BOT expanded the scope of CBDC development to business users. The Project is a collaboration between the BOT, SCG and Digital Ventures Company Limited (DV). In the project, BOT used CBDC with programmability features to help with supply-chain financing. 

The test results demonstrate that DLT can increase payment efficiency for businesses by allowing users to set various conditions on the CBDC (programmable money) to enhance flexibility in handling business activities. In the past two years, the project had generated strong business interests and proved the feasibility of the ideas and technology but also showed scope for it to be modified or extended, particularly with invoice tokenisation.

This session aims to showcase Bank of Thailand (BOT)'s Business Prototype Development Project for CBDCs and to generate ideas from the industry that will inform an extension project planned for kick-off at the Point Zero Forum. 

DLTs’ Sustainability in the Financial Sector
Hosted by Bank of Italy

The Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) - applied to banking, financial, insurance and payment services – has potential advantages and disadvantages. Applying new technologies, especially in untested markets, poses risks which need to be compared with benefits. From a policy perspective, proper technical set-up is crucial for addressing challenges in network scalability and processing speeds, and to reduce security risks. This makes increasing fact-based knowledge and training of relevant decision makers essential to fulfilling the technology’s potential.

This session aims to bring policymakers and the industry to work together on addressing legal and regulatory issues related to the use of blockchain technology and to galvanise an international coordination of policy actions. The related implications will be assessed with special regard to sustainability, in terms of business models, financial stability, consumer protection, interoperability, gross settlement in central bank money and payments security, as well as ESG factors.

Fostering a Green FinTech Ecosystem - Meeting of the Green FinTech Network
Hosted by Swiss Secretariat for International Finance 

The Green FinTech Network brings together leading green FinTechs and key stakeholders, such as venture capital firms, accelerators, consultants, universities, data providers and financial institutions. "Green FinTechs" refer to technology-based innovations that are used for all kinds of financial processes and products and which at the same time support sustainability goals or reduce sustainability risks. They play a key role in the collection and processing of sustainability data by providing them faster, more cost-efficiently and in a more easily comparable form. 

This meeting of the Green FinTech Network at the Point Zero Forum aims to convene members and interested industry players and regulators to assess the status-quo of the green FinTech ecosystem, showcase selected green FinTech solutions to highlight the range and potential of green FinTechs and to outline concrete actions by the Green FinTech Network to foster the green FinTech ecosystem, especially with regard to the availability of sustainability data.

Digital Assets: Guardian Network Roundtable
Hosted by Monetary Authority of Singapore

This roundtable marks the first-year anniversary of Project Guardian. Participants of each initiative will showcase their use case and share their findings. These will include the challenges and obstacles they faced to complete their live industry pilots and how they overcame them. 

This session will also discuss the future of digital assets and what lies ahead for the industry by addressing the following questions:

• How can the industry and regulators work together to build a responsible and innovative digital asset ecosystem?
• What defines a responsible digital asset market?
• What does the road to commercialisation look like?

Privacy in Digital Money From a Technology and Economic Perspective
Hosted by Swiss National Bank, in co-operation with the Swiss Centre of the BIS Innovation Hub

The roundtable aims to advance industry thinking on privacy in digital money by bringing together central bankers, regulators, financial services and technology leaders.

The roundtable aims to:

• Discuss the state of the art of privacy preserving technologies,
• Understand how regulation, consumer demand and industry are driving the development of such technologies, and
• Explore the role of central banks in providing privacy preserving CBDCs.

Breaking Down Borders: Interoperability and ESG Data Collaboration Across Markets
Hosted by Monetary Authority of Singapore

ESG data is fast becoming a core consideration in the financing space, from corporates to financial institutions to regulators. A growing set of relevant ESG data points are being deployed to optimise long-term risk-return considerations, track and analyse ESG performance across own operations and portfolio companies, identify areas of improvement, and develop climate resilience strategies towards net zero goals.

However, the lack of available access to comparable, material, and verifiable data remains a pressing challenge in this regard. Often, significant data gaps lead to incomplete and inaccurate analysis, resulting in costly incorrect business and financing decisions.

Several initiatives have been put in place to address these data challenges, encouraging, and facilitating the origination, standardisation, interoperability, and accessibility of ESG data, including data platforms such as the NZDPU by the CDSC, the NGFS by several central banks and Project Greenprint by the MAS.

Coupled with the data challenge is the subsequent use of the data. As having access to high quality, standardised, comparable and interoperable data does not necessarily lead to meaningful action. Stakeholders must also be aware of and have access to the innovative products and solutions that consume the data and produce insights to make prudent decisions and implement business and financing strategies in order to reach net zero goals. Making available the discovery, testing and deployment of these products and services is a possible next step. 

To tackle these challenges, an industry consultation through this roundtable seeks to obtain the views and recommendations from experts and stakeholders. These could range from, but not limited to, the identifying of real pain points and actionable use cases to the ideation of possible solutions with a strong value proposition and a recommended structure for incentivisation.

Digital Assets: Programmable Money Roundtable 
Hosted by Monetary Authority of Singapore

Digital assets enabled through the innovative combination of tokenisation and distributed ledgers offer transformative economic potential. If done right, the digital asset ecosystem could potentially facilitate more efficient transactions, enhance financial inclusion, and unlock economic value. A digital asset ecosystem needs a medium of exchange to facilitate transactions – three popular candidates are tokenised bank liabilities, stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

This session brings together industry experts from financial institutions, fintechs, central banks, regulators and e-commerce players to discuss real life usage of programmable money, how it differs from programmable payments and existing financial rails. The session will discuss the benefits and limitations as well as the key considerations that are paramount for their adoption. 

The roundtable will explore the establishment of a common interoperable interface for programmable money and how value can be exchanged globally with this interface. Topics for discussion include smart contract design, interoperability between networks and the use of underlying digital tokens such as CBDCs, stablecoins and tokenised deposits.

Cryptoassets and Climate Change: Understanding the Carbon Footprint and Opportunities to Dampen It
Hosted by Central Bank of Hungary

As the reduction of energy consumption and of related harmful emissions becomes an even higher priority, the overall ecological footprint of the blockchain ecosystem needs to have a tight control with the ambition to have a moderated impact on our future environment. Currently, even the measurement of crypto assets’ carbon footprint is challenging, but there are already promising initiatives worth looking into for a more sustainable blockchain ecosystem. While more and more regulators recognise the impact of this issue, a comprehensive, globally adaptable regulation or standard is painfully missing.

The insights from this session hosted by the MNB (Central Bank of Hungary) will feed into a press release highlighting the importance of a coherent and consistent measurement and disclosure system related to crypto activities, as well as call for preparatory work on the minimum criteria for regulatory requirements of crypto activities’ carbon footprint disclosure and ecological impact minimisation.

DeFi and FX Markets
Hosted by BIS Innovation Hub

Decentralised finance (DeFi) employs public blockchain networks and smart contracts to build open, transparent, composable and non-custodial financial protocols. DeFi may potentially become a relevant part of the future financial system, for example through the decentralised exchange of tokenised assets with so-called automated market makers (AMMs). AMMs are smart contracts holding tokenised assets and act as counterparts in asset exchanges. One possible application of AMMs is in FX markets.

To understand the possible role and impact of AMMs in the future of cross-border payments, the BIS Innovation Hub together with central bank partners from France, Singapore and Switzerland has launched Project Mariana. The proof of concept explores the use of AMMs and wholesale central bank digital currencies (wCBDCs). It informs how new technologies may potentially impact the principles of FX markets and market making, and reveals potential business, policy, and governance considerations for not just AMMs, but also for the potential supra-national use of CBDCs.

The roundtable discussion is split into two parts. The first will cover key learnings from the Mariana experiment. This part evaluates technology aspects as well as key design considerations from business and policy perspectives. The second part of the discussion focuses on motivations of Project Mariana, by looking into future directions of exploration at the nexus of DeFi and traditional finance.

This roundtable brings together central bankers, industry members in FX markets, thought leaders from academia and the DeFi ecosystem to advance the discourse on the possible role of DeFi in a future financial system.

Artificial Intelligence in Finance: Market Transformation and Policy Considerations
Hosted by Swiss Secretariat for International Finance

Developments in the field of AI are fast and already changing the world as we know it. The financial sector, which is used to working with a large amount of standardised data, is no stranger to these changes. This roundtable will focus on the implications of AI for financial market participants and regulators. 

Part 1: The first part of the roundtable will address current developments affecting the financial sector. Participants will also look into the crystal ball and talk about the potential structural shifts that may unfold as a result of the rise of AI in the financial sector. 

Part 2: The second part of the roundtable will be dedicated to exploring the implications of AI for financial market policy. Traditional policy objectives such as financial stability and market integrity will be covered. 

Part 3: The third part will focus on topics at the frontier of financial market policy: ethics and fairness. With the increasing use of AI in the financial sector, these topics have come to the forefront for both authorities and financial market participants.