Ladies and gentlemen, dear students,
Thank you first of all for this invitation. It is a pleasure to be able to discuss with you today, in Dijon, about the payments landscape which is currently undergoing profound changes, just like our financial system as a whole. Payments are indeed subject to increasing digitalization, which we experience on a daily basis with, for example, online payments or mobile payments.
In parallel with the development of these new means of payment, new technologies have emerged such as those of distributed ledger technologies, or DLT according to their English acronym, “ Distributed ledger technologies “. You probably know the best known of them, the blockchain, which is a chain of blocks allowing transactions to be grouped and secured by cryptographic means. It is on this technology that crypto-assets have emerged, which aim to be both means of payment and investment or placement vehicles.
New services have gradually been created around these crypto-assets, to the point of forming so-called “decentralized” finance (Decentralised Finance“DeFi”), which presents itself as an alternative to traditional finance and designates a set of services on tokenized assets, comparable to financial services and carried out without the intervention of a financial intermediary. This is why we also use the term disintermediated finance.
As a central bank, guarantor of the stability and proper functioning of the financial system and monetary stability, we are very attentive to these developments, and in particular to the development of “crypto-assets” which present themselves as settlement assets. Although in existence for almost two decades, these assets continue to be the subject of discussion regarding their scope and implications for the functioning of our monetary and financial system.
