Where Finance Finds Its Future Future of Finance

A Future of Finance interview with Peter Gargone, CEO of Ntier Financial Services.
Data is now at the heart of every efficiency initiative in financial services: investing, trading, operations, risk management and compliance. The advent of blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies are altering the nature of the relationship between data and technology, even as they make it easier to solve some age-old problems in data aggregation and management. Peter Gargone is CEO of Ntier Financial Services, a company he set up more than 20 years ago after experiencing at first hand the challenges investment banks faced in managing and using their data. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to him about how regulatory demands are revealing new opportunities in the processing and integration of both internal and external data.

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In the minds of many, the digital art market is indelibly associated with Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), which boomed and then bust in 2021-22, accompanied by the further taint of money laundering and insider dealing. But art was digital long before OpenSea sought to democratise it and its future remains sufficiently rosy for Sotheby’s to have launched a peer-to-peer digital art market of its own in the Spring of 2023. What digital art has lacked is what the art market has lacked – namely, data on which to base valuations – and with less excuse than its analogue ancestor. After all, the digital art market is as surrounded and saturated by digitised data as any other market. But until now the digital art market has lacked not only its equivalents of Bloomberg or Reuters to provide the relevant data but the equivalent of BlackRock Aladdin to aggregate and analyse it. UNTITLED GEN, a quantitative investment advisory firm that is using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to sift digitised data for information useful to digital artists and digital art investors, has emerged to plug the gap. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Clemens Wessendorff and Simon Zimmerman, the co-founders of UNTITLED GEN.
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InvestaX is a tokenisation platform for real and privately managed asset funds based – where else? – in Singapore, the financial centre that is doing more than any other jurisdiction to turn the idea of tokenisation into a reality. Like others in Singapore, including the regulators, the founders of InvestaX believe that DeFi innovations such as automated market-making have an institutional future – and not only because their experience dates back to the ICO boom of 2017-18, that intensely creative period in which the origins of tokenisation lie. To be part of its institutional future, InvestaX has secured operating licences from the regulators and chosen to work with regulated institutions on both the cash and custody sides of its business. And they are operating in the most progressive financial eco-system on the planet, where institutional DeFi is being built by regulators and regulated. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Alice Chen, co-founder, chief operating officer and general counsel at InvestaX.
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130 central banks around the world are now exploring the merits of issuing a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) but as recently as 2015 not a single one was doing that, even though the idea of digital money dates back to the 1990s. The founders of eCurrency, on the other hand, a Dublin-headquartered company with deep roots in Silicon Valley, have been thinking about CBDCs ever since the great financial crisis of 2007-09. Unlike Satoshi Nakamoto, however, their concern was not to use technology to create a trustless, peer-to-peer alternative to the failed fiat currency system controlled by central bank and commercial bank intermediaries, but to rejuvenate central bank money by making it available to households and consumers via the Internet. eCurrency now offers a technology that enables central banks to mint a purely digital form of fiat currency that functions as a bearer instrument – an Internet version, if you like, of physical notes and coins. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Jonathan Dharmapalan, CEO of eCurrency.
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Download the Future of Finance Stablecoins Paper Now
Regulated banks are waking up to the threats and opportunities created by the decision to bring Stablecoins within the regulatory perimeter. In both domestic and international payments and securities markets, regulated Stablecoins offer liberation from the status quo as well as the threat of disintermediation. Where doing nothing is not a survivable option, understanding exactly what is going on is essential to the formulation of a viable strategy.
What topics were discussed?
Have Stablecoins escaped their origins in the cryptocurrency markets?What makes Stablecoins unstable?Are Stablecoins a vector of contagion that threatens financial stability?How do tokenised deposits differ from Stablecoins?How do Stablecoins create credit?Could Stablecoins develop into a shadow banking system?How will Stablecoins inter-operate with central bank digital currencies?For banks, are Stablecoins friend or foe?Do Stablecoins threaten non-bank incumbents in the payments industry?How are Stablecoins being regulated in the major financial centres?What is the capital treatment of Stablecoins?Must non-bank issuers of Stablecoins secure banking licences?Are Stablecoins the future of international and/or domestic payments?Are Stablecoins the key to the growth of tokenised digital assets markets?Are Stablecoins an end-state or an intermediate stage in the evolution of money?
Download the Future of Finance Stablecoins Paper Now
The panel
Gilbert Verdian CEO at Quant https://www.linkedin.com/in/gverdian/
Amarjit Singh Partner | EMEIA Assurance Blockchain Leader | Financial Services at EY https://www.linkedin.com/in/amarjit-singh-jeet/
Ricardo Correia Senior Technology Executive at R3 https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricardo-m-correia/
Keith Bear Fellow at the Centre for Alternative Finance at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-bear-2b7407/
Moderated by Dominic Hobson Co-Founder at Future of Finance https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominic-hobson-49b8222/


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The asset management industry has grown fat on a quarter-century of exceptionally loose central bank monetary policies. Ever-rising asset values have allowed managers to largely ignore shrinking fees, rising costs, failed outsourcing and offshoring arrangements and a long-term secular trend from high margin active investment strategies to low-margin passive alternatives. But now a combination of rising interest rates, the reversal of quantitative easing and geopolitical and market uncertainties have exposed a fragile business model, putting profitability on a downward trajectory. The threat has woken asset managers to the need for radical change. Vendors that once found it hard to interest the industry in new ways of generating revenue and cutting costs are getting more than a hearing – they are taking on clients. One of the newcomers is FundGuard, a Cloud-based software as a service platform for investment management and administration whose initial mission is to transform an area that once seemed immune to technological change: fund accounting. Dominic Hobson, co-founder of the Future of Finance, spoke to FundGuard president John Lehner. 
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