“Same risks, same rules,” said Mark Carney at a panel on Big Tech and the future of finance at an International Monetary Fund event in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday. He also predicted that the U.K. government will set up a payments system in which small- and medium-sized enterprises would own and be able to transfer the financial and demographic data they generated. (The Logic)
Talking point: Unlike regulators who’ve mainly focused on the financial-stability and money-laundering implications of digital currencies like the Facebook-led Libra, Carney has also spoken positively about such coins. He is also keen to encourage competition between them, citing India, whose central and commercial banks have partnered on an electronic payments settlement system. “The heart of payments is interoperability,” said fellow panelist Nandan Nilekani, noting that the setup allows users of different services to send money to one another. Nilekani is a former tech executive who led the digital identity program on which the payments system is partly based. “The uniqueness of this model is that Big Tech participates along with the banks,” he said; no banks are part of the Libra project. David Marcus, head of Facebook’s Calibra financial services division, said while the Indian model is a good one, “those efforts are often domestic, in one region,” and that there’s a need for a new global system to move money around the world.