Fintech expert Jame DiBiasio, a true Sibos Insider, is a resident blogger for Sibos 2021, offering his unique take on this year’s event. This blog is part of a series released daily throughout Sibos week.</em></p> Sibos has given us a lot to digest this year. When I think about the massive opportunities in improving our financial services and our infrastructure, I feel like it ultimately comes down to Who.</p> Who benefits from innovation?</p> Who takes responsibility when things don’t go as planned?</p> Most of all, who is being served?</p> Identity has always been core to payments and transaction banking. The reason we have so much regulation is usually about who is receiving or sending money, who owns what asset, and who else can be brought into the financial system.</p> But technology means the way we identify people and companies is being transformed into data.</p> Data is not just an identifier. Not anymore. It is becoming a commodity, a product, and arguably a currency.</p> Think of the way banking has evolved over the centuries as a series of ways to create new forms of money. Fractional-reserve banking means commercial banks magic money into being, by simply adding assets and liabilities to a ledger.</p> Along the way, these assets and liabilities became tradeable instruments, and then they became things people, companies, or intermediaries could use as a form of money.</p> Ultimately the entire financial system is based on the savings of people. The industry transforms our money into payments, loans, insurance, and investments.</p> Today we are seeing data transformed this way. An obvious example is how social media platforms have turned users and their data into the product.</p> Squint, now, at the horizon and what is going on in decentralised finance and the Internet of Things. Today your refrigerator can alert you when you’re out of milk. Tomorrow it will use smart contracts to order new supplies. Soon we won’t be just using fridges to buy milk. With biometrics and the beginnings of amazing neural technologies, personal attributes could be embedded into our wallets, wearables – or just based on our face.</p> I always think of that scene in the Tom Cruise movie “Minority Report” where, surgically implanted with another man’s eyes, he runs through a department store whose sensors keeps making him offers based on the donor’s shopping history.</p> That scene might remain in the realm of sci-fi, but the building blocks are already here. I have no doubt that many tech companies and financial institutions are trying to make it a reality.</p> The question of “who”, therefore, is not just about digital identity for the sake of remitting funds or opening an investment account.</p> Our creditworthiness, our risk attributes, our psychometric profile, and our portfolios might be a permanent part of our physical bodies. We’ll become financial cyborgs.</p> Today the front lines of identity appear to be governments such as India or Singapore that have built national identity databases. These have made basic financial services radically easier to provide. But other models may yet come, based on cryptography, decentralised infrastructure, and software (probably powered by quantum computers) that allows us to become walking, talking, breathing forms of money.</p> The history of money has been one of increasing abstraction: from coins to paper, from electronic ledgers to plastic cards, and now to pure digital tokens. Perhaps the final leap will be the grand reversal, from the abstract to the material: we – our bodies – become the physical manifestations of money.</p> I realise this is not the way that you are going to approach your next team meeting, be it in person or on Zoom. You have more specific companies to build, products to design, infrastructure to orchestrate.</p> But as I ponder this future, it takes me to many of the questions that were raised this week at Sibos, in particular around digital identity. We cannot know the outcomes from what we do today. But as we look to make digital identity widespread, secure, and useful, we are laying foundations for even more radical change.</p> Thanks for joining me this week. It’s been a terrific learning experience.</p>