It has been a busy week in the fintech space. Joining me is Anastasia Kinsky, Fintech TV correspondent and editor of The Signal newsletter. Anastasia, welcome to the show. It has been a big week for industry collaboration. What have we seen from the Bank of International Settlements regarding Project Agora?
Thank you for having me. The theme of this week is definitely industry collaboration. Project Agora has gone live. The BIS has been pushing forward a number of projects in this area for some time — collaborating between banks and central banks to explore tokenisation use cases across the financial ecosystem. This one is specifically about cross-border tokenised money transfers. Project Agora brings together 28 banks — JP Morgan, Citi, UBS, and others — and what they have now demonstrated is that real money, specifically tokenised commercial bank deposits, can be settled against tokenised central bank reserves very quickly. It is still in pilot phase, but it is live and it happened. It is a very exciting moment for watching what international finance looks like in a tokenised world.
What else have we seen from European banks digitising finance this week?
Ten European banks this week announced they are coming together to launch Regulated Layer One — a member-owned blockchain system. That includes ABN Amro, Natixis, and a number of others, with NatWest among those joining soon. It is another great example of international collaboration where cross-border banks are saying: the easiest way to adopt tokenisation is to have a shared blockchain that we can all speak to. Interoperability is the key question for any bank looking to tokenise assets, and this is their answer.
The theme is clearly collaboration. But what about AI — who collaborated this week, and who sounded the alarm bells?
The key difference I have always seen between blockchain and AI adoption is that AI you can just get ahead with — whereas blockchain genuinely requires the whole industry to talk to each other. But what Nvidia showed this week is that there are still areas in AI where cross-industry collaboration is needed. They announced a new alliance to build and share open tools that promote responsible use of AI and build trust in the technology. But crucially — and this is what made the headlines — there is no sign of Anthropic, no sign of OpenAI, and no sign of Google. So you have to wonder how you build trust if the most powerful players are not at the table.
Along those same lines, Anthropic this week disclosed that its Claude models breached three of its own live systems during cybersecurity testing. That is very similar to what we saw last week with OpenAI, and it shows that AI systems are getting cleverer and cleverer. The alarm bells are ringing. There is a security question here that the industry needs to address — and it makes the case for exactly the kind of industry collaboration that everyone has been talking about this week.
Thank you Anastasia. And of course, do not miss a beat — sign up for The Signal newsletter at Fintech TV to stay ahead of the biggest stories shaping the world of fintech.
