Profile

Location

London

Member since

2009

Writes about

Payments Regulation & Compliance Retail banking Cryptocurrency Predictions

Jeremy's blog archive

2024 (1) 2022 (1) 2021 (1) 2020 (5) 2019 (2) 2018 (7) 2017 (7) 2016 (8) 2015 (6)

Jeremy Light

Co-founder at Fourdotzero

Message Posts: 38 Comments: 96

Bio Co-founder of Fourdotzero, a payments network, market intelligence and technology company. Payments to fuel the Fourth Industrial Revolution Career History Fourdotzero November 2020 to present Ripple April 2018 - October 2020 Accenture until Feb 2018

Blogs

Open Banking

UK Open Banking Payments in 2024

09 Jan 2024

A year ago, I believed UK Open Banking payments were on a roll. Total payment initiations for 2022 were 68 million payments, an increase of 171% over 2021, showing a strong foundation for Open Banking. At this rate, I believed 1bn payments a year could be reached in 2025, a level where Open Banking would be firmly established in the UK payments la...

Blockchain in Banking and Financial Services

The Risks to Society of Central Bank Digital Currencies

17 Jan 2022

There is much written about CBDCs but little on the risks to society a CBDC would create. I see these risks falling into three categories: 1. economic 2. financial 3. human rights Economic Risks The key economic risk is inflation. A CBDC can be created at the press of a button and distributed widely, inflating the money supply without any correspon...

Blockchain in Banking and Financial Services

Bitcoin at 50,000 USD

18 Feb 2021

Bitcoin at 50k USD In March 2018 I posted a Finextra blog “Bitcoin at 50,000 USD”. It was framed as a scenario rather than a prediction and I observed that no-one could possibly know with any certainty what would happen next with Bitcoin. However, the objective of the blog was to examine what Bitcoin and the crypto landscape would look like should...

The Payments Business

Big Brother is Watching You - Payment Systems, Surveillance Systems, Control Systems

29 Sep 2020

1230 words, 4:50 min read An Orwellian Dystopia As more and more payments become digital, a key question for payment systems architects is how to preserve the privacy of their users. Without privacy, payments systems risk becoming surveillance systems for government agencies and for corporations. In turn these can be extended into control systems ...

See all Jeremy's blogs

Jeremy is Commenting on

US FS giants explore multi-asset settlement using share ledger tech

This looks very similar to the UK's Regulated Liability Network "a financial market infrastructure (FMI), operating a shared ledger with central bank money, commercial bank money and electronic money on the same network", being managed by UK Finance. Some of the participants are the same in both - is there a connection?

09 May 2024 Reply Read article

EBAday 2024: The future of CBDCs, tokenised deposits and stablecoin adoption

"we must not forget the contribution that retail central bank money has made to monetary and financial stability." The BoE ties itself in knots trying to justify a retail CBDC - in the same speech the deputy governor admits that cash has dropped from around two-thirds of transactions twenty years ago to 14% in 2022. This drop has had no impact on monetary or financial stability and it demonstrates consumers have no preference for central bank money over commercial bank deposits (and I doubt most have any idea of the difference risk profiles of the two). In the past, cash was a source of instability as it provided a mechanism for a bank run, with depositors able to withdraw their savings en masse. Nowadays, if a bank is in trouble depositors are highly unlikely to withdraw cash at scale but instead transfer deposits electronically to other banks (as happened with Northern Rock in 2008) - the banking system may freeze up for a while as banks refuse to lend reserves to each other when large volumes of deposits are transferred between banks, but the total value of deposits in the banking system remains the same and locked-in without cash withdrawals. A retail CBDC would reintroduce this stability risk if depositors are able to withdraw deposits instantly out of the banking system electronically into a retail CBDC, causing a run on multiple banks. The interesting aspect of this speech is that a wholesale CBDC is gaining traction in the BoE's plans. A wholesale CBDC is in the sweetspot of a central bank and has some real benefits - hopefully the BoE will focus more on a wholesale CBDC and quietly kick the retail CBDC idea into the long grass.

22 Apr 2024 Reply Read article

Banks "barking up the wrong tree" over CBDC deposit flight says ECB

e-money intistutions hold about 35bn EUR in customer depoits in Europe compared to about 17trn EUR in commercial bank deposits. That's 0.2% - difficult to see how EMIs and by extension stablecoins pose a threat to banks.

21 Feb 2024 Reply Read article

Digital pound consultation: User privacy and access to cash key concerns

This article omits to mention that there were 51,529 responses to the consultation of which 555 were from organisations through the online questionnaire. 40,330 were from individuals also through the online questionnaire. Presumably the remaining 10,644 responses by email and letter (41) were from individuals as well. These numbers are huge/off-the-scale for a government financial sector consultation - as a comparison the recent Garner Future of Payments Review attracted around 60 responses, mainly from organisations. Given the extraordinary number of responses from members of the public this looks as much a public petition as it is a consultation. Unfortunately, there is no breakdown of the responses to each question so it is impossible to know the weight of feedback nor the contrast between the views of Fintechs, academia etc on what they believe the public want versus the actual views expressed by the public in the individual responses. However, it clearly shows public concern on the 'digital pound' is running very high.

25 Jan 2024 Reply Read article