A business-friendly Swiss think tank has developed a set of steps for the government to help the fledgling fintech industry. One of the measures proposed looks fairly controversial.
Avenir Suisse, a liberal-leaning pro-business organization, aims to promote an approach toward new technologies by looking more at their potential use instead of their risks only – and titled the paper published on Tuesday «An Opportunity for the Swiss Financial Industry».
Advantages of DLT
The study authors – Jennifer Anthamatten and Pascal Lago – identified three areas with particular potential for the Swiss financial market:
- As a pioneer in trading tokenized securities, Switzerland could expand its relatively small capital market
- The distributed ledger technology (DLT) makes relevant documents in trade finance accessible to everyone concerned at all times, cutting a great deal of administrative work and expense
- Wealth managers can use technology to exploit new business models and client segments, for example in the safekeeping of the private keys required for access to any DLT system.
Avenir Suisse said that a lot of groundwork had been done in all the areas mentioned, but the country now had to take the next step in the development of DLT – making Switzerland a fully-fledged DLT nation.
Introduction of E-Franc
One of the key requirements to help the financial industry develop further in this field is the development of a Swiss franc token, the think tank authors said. Also, there was a need to modernize the interfaces between the public and private sectors, for example e-ID and the registry of deeds.
The Swiss National Bank is looking closely into the development of central bank issued digital currencies, but has made plain that it wasn’t currently planning to issue an electronic currency due to the unknown risks to the monetary system.
