The world of virtual or digital assets is real, and has a role to play in the evolution of finance. Facebook, now Meta, has staked its future in the metaverse, while other players including Apple are building metaverses of their own. How is anyone going to pay and get paid? Should our business be in there too? These are some of the big questions we get asked about cryptocurrencies and decentralised finance.

Visa and Mastercard are the most successful and profitable examples of centralized finance: a handful of IBM supercomputers instantly processes all transactions on their networks across the entire world. But in today’s world of banking and payments, decentralised finance is causing great anxiety among traditional bankers. Do you really have reason to be worried? 

JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon never hid his contempt for bitcoin. In 2020, he called it “a fraud”. When the cryptocurrency hit an all-time high six months ago, Dimon said “I personally think bitcoin is worthless”. But in April 2022, Jamie Dimon wrote in his annual shareholders letter: “Decentralised finance and blockchain are real, new technologies that can be deployed in both public and private fashion, permissioned or not.”

But what exactly is decentralised finance? Is it a radical new infrastructure or simply a way of re-deploying existing resources? Will banks be helping to upend their own business models by adopting decentralised finance?

What is it about Decentralised Finance that bankers prefer over bitcoin and cryptocurrencies – and are they really different things? Are smart contracts really what they purport to be – or are they, as many traditional finance experts say – ‘neither smart nor contracts’.

This programme is designed for executives looking to understand if decentralised finance should be part of their future offering. Is it right for your bank or payments business? Should you hold digital assets on your bank’s balance sheet – and how are assets or tokens held or stored?