How Stablecoins and Central Bank Digital Currencies Can Shake Up Financial Services and Payments

Isabelle MARTZ * Cadre dirigeant au sein de la Direction Innovation, Groupe Société Générale. Contact : isabelle.martz@socgen.com et isabelle.martz@yahoo.fr.Les vues exprimées sont celles de l'auteure et n'engagent pas la Société Générale. Elles sont exprimées à la fin de novembre 2022. L'auteure remercie Christian Pfister, Pierre Lahbabi, Yves Blavet, Marc Samama et Camille Rolland pour leurs remarques. Elle reste seule responsable d'erreurs éventuelles.

Blockchain technology makes possible a new economy, which is called a “tokenized economy”, with digital assets of a new type. But the tokenized world still lacks maturity in its technological, legal, and regulatory aspects, as well as in its uses, and still has many challenges: cybersecurity, data sharing and protection, the technological issues of interoperability and scalability, the temptation of some public and private players to extensively recentralize, global systemic impacts (financial, environmental, and social), the need for education and to support the development of skills. While the field of application for blockchains is very broad, they have initially been used in financial services and payments, where decentralized technologies seem to have strong potential. Banks have a big role to play in shaping the foundations of this new economy. They are legitimate and can provide security, trust, and interoperability between new and traditional solutions for it. Despite the lack of regulatory clarity and technological maturity, they need to start experimenting and stepping up because for them, as for the other economic players, doing nothing is not an option.