The opposing forces reshaping global finance

SAN FRANCISCO: Two secular trends will shape finance in the years ahead, one powered from the bottom up by transformative technological innovations, and the other from the top down by geoeconomic influences. Managing each will require major adaptations from financial firms and their regulators, a task complicated by the fact that the two trends are pulling in opposite directions, and their resolution is not yet clear.

From a bottom-up perspective, AI, blockchains, and tokenisation have the potential to make financial transactions faster and cheaper, yielding economy-wide productivity gains. But this promise comes with potential peril, including the risk of technology-driven job displacement and cybercrime.