Open Banking Expo, the leading global community of Open Banking and Open Finance executives responsible for digital transformation across financial services, will host thought leaders and practitioners for the Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) Confex on 10 March 2022.

This agenda-setting virtual event, which is running for the second consecutive year, will explore the latest developments in CBDCs, including evolving use cases. It will also cover CBDCs’ journey from conception to reality, their impact on financial systems and monetary policies, how they can improve on existing payment systems and the evolving attitudes of central banks, regulators and policymakers.  
 

Adam Cox, co-founder and CEO of Open Banking Expo, said: “The future of money has well and truly arrived. From cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, to stablecoins and tokens, the race to replace cash with digital money is on. And for central banks that control the supply of money, the new digital economy is an area of increased focus, with particular attention given to the role and function of CBDCs. 

“Our event last year revealed growing appetite and interest in this area, and we really look forward to bringing together trailblazers behind some of the latest initiatives and developments in CBDCs.”

Barry James, founder and CEO of Token Intelligence, will set the scene for the day by looking into why CBDCs should be introduced, whether or not central banks should succumb to the pressure to develop a government-backed digital currency, how CBDCs can help modernise the international monetary and payments landscape, and what is required of regulators and policymakers to support this transformation.

James said: “One way or another the combination of geopolitics and decentralised technologies and their spin-offs mean we are entering a disruptive new era of money and finance that will make fintech look like a first ripple on a pond. This will have profound and far reaching implications for us all, inside the industry and out, which we have hardly begun to explore. So I welcome the opportunity to plumb these depths together.”

The carefully curated conversations will also look at CBDCs in light of the broader macro picture of the growth of cryptoassets, fiscal and monetary risks, regulatory headwinds, as well as data and privacy issues. 

Division Chief at the Bank of Jamaica Novelette Panton said, “Central Bank Digital Currency plays a major role in Bank of Jamaica’s quest to further digitise payment services and support the government’s digital transformation of the economy. In this regard, CBDC is an enabler of easy and secure access to financial products and services by all Jamaicans thereby facilitating  the country’s National Financial Inclusion Strategy,” 

The attendees will get insights into how central banks and payments innovators around the world are developing their respective CBDCs and digital money, and what progress is being made in integrating CBDCs with other payment systems and applications. 

For example, they will hear from the Bank for International Settlements who along with Banque de France, the Swiss National Bank and a private sector consortium were behind two experiments: Project Jura and Project Helvetica. Project Helvetica focused on the integration of wholesale CBDC into the existing financial ecosystem. It demonstrated that a wholesale CBDC can be integrated with existing core banking systems and processes of commercial and central banks. And Project Jura tested the cross-border settlement of tokenised assets and

wholesale CBDCs. It studied a new approach for central banks to allow access to wholesale CBDCs for regulated non-resident financial institutions. 

“Given the rapid developments in global payments that the pandemic has accelerated and the fact that more and more central banks are taking the idea of CBDCs seriously, it’s more important than ever to learn more about the subject. There are so many unanswered questions that we need to consider and listening to lots of points of view can help us understand these issues more,” said James Pomeroy, Global Economist, HSBC.

The delegates will also learn about the US-based FedNow Programme, its overall design, management and operations.

This year’s line-up also includes:

• David Copple, Policy Manager, Digital Currencies, Bank of England

• Dan Anthony, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, FedNow, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

• Oliver Sigrist, Advisor, BIS

• Anne-Catherine Bohnert, Deputy Head of the Digital Currency & Innovation Service, Banque de France

• Novelette Panton, Division Chief, Financial Markets Infrastructure, Bank of Jamaica

• James Pomeroy, Global Economist, HSBC

• Manuel Klein, Product Manager, Deutsche Bank

• Jonathan Dharmapalan, Chief Executive Officer, ecurrency

• Xiaochen Zhang, Principal Manager, AWS

• Aman Cheema, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Global Real Time Payments​, FIS

• Austin Elwood​, Manager, Payments Policy, UK Finance

• Omri Ross, Chief Blockchain Scientist, eToro

• Peter Clifford, CBDC & Payments Head, Digital Asset

• Nilixa Devlukia, Founder, Payments Solved