On the 20th of October 2022, twimbit in partnership with F5 and Kyndryl organized the inaugural “Bank of Tomorrow Asia Pacific Summit”. We were thrilled to have Charu Sethi, Unique Network and Andre Chan, SCB Tech X to chat with Varnika Goel, twimbit to discuss their aspirations and vision for the future.

Session Title: The Future of Digital Assets

Speakers:

• Varnika Goel, Research Director and Co-Founder, twimbit
• Andre Chan, Innovation Lead, SCB TechX
• Charu Sethi, Chief Marketing Officer, Unique Network

Digital assets, in essence, are assets, such as cryptocurrency that are digitzed. However, it is in fact more than that. As Charu quotes from Swift, “Digital assets are virtual records of value that could be stored or transferred across a cryptographically secured ledger.”

Envisioning digital assets into the banking ecosystem

With digital assets on the rise and being the new buzzword for most of the industry, banks are looking to embed digital assets into their ecosystem to increase profitability and sustainability. Currently, there are a few potential use cases that banks can explore. These potential use cases can assist in banks helping to;

• Target a greater outreach of customers that are unbanked or underbanked
• Create smoother user interactions with DeFi (decentralized finance) applications that are complex to learn
• Compete with crypto native firms in profitability
• Quicken the speed of transactions through decentralized finance at lower costs
• Generate banks’ own digital currencies

When it comes envisioning digital assets into the banking ecosystem, banks have treated it similarly to digital transformation. In short, banks aim to;

• Deliver an enhanced form of customer experience
• Create new product and revenue models

Most importantly, the major opportunity banks can target to embed digital assets into its ecosystem lies in the private equity and debt market. Specifically, the opportunity in how digital assets can create a more efficient administration of assets. This is because that particular market consists of gaps and inefficiencies, which banks can capitalise on, delivering more efficient and accessible new digital investment products.

“Open proper composable financial product isolation. This is what banks are looking for when it comes to embedding digital assets into the banking ecosystem.” – Andre Chan, Innovation Lead at SCB TechX

Is there opportunity to grow with digital assets?

It is possible. For example, since NFTs are stackable, enterprises and financial institutions can add more content and benefit to the same NFT to provide more value in the loyalty programs banks offer to customers. Charu Sethi’s experience at Unique Network, an infrastructure player focused on building advanced use cases of digital assets explains it best on what banks need to do.

“There is definitely opportunity to grow and create new things. However, the banks and organizations, they just need to have a little bit of vision to help them steer on what they want to do. They shouldn’t be steered by all the hype they see around them.” – Charu Sethi, Chief Marketing Officer at Unique Network

Banks can look into developing a sense of community among its customers, an element that is highly present across the acquisition of tokens and digital assets. Creating community elements with digital assets is a massive growth potential banks should explore to leverage new and innovative models for their business.

“Crowd funding, crowd loans, all those become very intuitive, making way for newer products to rise.” – Charu Sethi, Chief Marketing Officer at Unique Network.