Today’s podcast commences with a brief discussion with Syed Musheer Ahmed of FinStep Asia and Monica Jasuja of the Emerging Payments Association on a recent LinkedIn post1 of Musheer’s stating that the lines between traditional finance and decentralized finance, or DeFi, have not just blurred but have merged thanks to SWIFT’s announcement at its annual conference in late-September that it will add a Blockchain based ledger to its infrastructure stack to hasten and scale the benefits of across over 200 countries and territories worldwide.
Following that, we chat with finance and technology lawyer M. Konrad Borowicz, an assistant professor at Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society in the Netherlands, about a paper he recently presented entitled “Extraterritorial Frictions in the Law of Cross-Border Payments”2 at the European Central Bank’s Legal Research Program seminar in Frankfurt.
Please see the links in the footnotes.
Biography:
Syed Musheer Ahmed has over 18 years of extensive experience as an ecosystem builder in the realms of capital markets, fintech, and virtual assets. This includes a decade as a global markets trader before he came to Hong Kong to attain his MBA from the University of Hong Kong and London Business School’s joint program.
Since 2016, Musheer has contributed extensively to building the region’s fintech and virtual assets ecosystem, particularly as the co-founder, concurrent board member, and inaugural general manager of the Fintech Association of Hong Kong.
For almost five years, he has been the managing director of FinStep Asia, a firm that he founded. In the interim, from October 2022 until January 2024, he served as a financial markets risk assurance lead with the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority in Dubai.
Monica Jasuja is the chief expansion & innovation officer of the Emerging Payments Association Asia, and is the advisory board chair of the India-based Fintech Fusion. She is a veteran digital business executive with over two decades of global experience in strategizing, defining, leading, building, and deploying commercially viable innovative software products and solutions, primarily in financial services.
She has a passion for solving consumer problems in the areas of digital payments and consumer products. She says that continuously learning to help businesses grow and disrupt is “both my strength and a key driver.”
Monica is also an accomplished product leader, having managed multi-year strategic initiatives across the fields of design, development, deployment, and go-to-market (primarily for the financial services sector). She has ample international exposure in markets such as the US, Singapore, Taiwan, and India.
Since 2017, she has spearheaded a new vertical for large digital players and emerging fintech initiatives across sales, business development, product, and other cross-functional areas (legal, marketing, and policy) to create new revenue and expansion opportunities for payment rails across India.
M. Konrad Borowicz is a finance and technology lawyer whose research focuses on the regulation of credit, payments, and open data. Currently, he is an assistant professor at Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society in the Netherlands, and a research coordinator at the Tilburg Law and Economics Center.
He has held visiting research and teaching positions at HKU, FGV São Paulo in Brazil, and Nova University in Lisbon, Portugal. Konrad’s work has appeared in the Journal of Financial Regulation, Capital Markets Law Journal, and the New York University Journal of Law and Business, among other publications. He is currently developing a book on EU Payments Law and Regulation, together with Emanuel van Praag, for Oxford University Press. Before coming to academia, Konrad was a finance lawyer at Ropes & Gray in London.
Discussion:
Why does the Swift organization’s action matter? The Swift network is used by over 11,500 financial institutions in more than 220 countries, making it the backbone of international finance. Essentially, every corner of the world: “It facilitates the transfer of value between banks globally underpinned by its messaging service, and roughly every three days, the world’s GDP passes over their network.”
Suppose a bank or financial institution already has SWIFT rails. In that case, they are likely to continue to leverage this TradFi institution – usually owned and run by the banks as a collective – to underpin their tokenized finance initiatives.”
Swift and a group of more than 30 financial institutions globally will develop a shared digital ledger, with the initial focus on real-time 24/7 cross-border payments. Specifically, Swift will work with Consensys (founded by the Cofounder of Ethereum) on a conceptual prototype of the ledger, which will leverage Swift’s unmatched resiliency, security, and scalability to facilitate transactions using any form of regulated tokenized value.
The initiative will see Swift partner up with Bank of America, Citigroup, NatWest, and others to develop a shared digital ledger for tokenized assets, including stablecoins.
It will combine straight-through processing and value+messaging capabilities on a single platform that every major bank uses.
The conversation starts with Musheer and Monica explaining why they believe the lines between TradFi and DeFi no longer hold the same significance. They also talk about the stablecoin implications of Swift building its own blockchain to enable transactions between banks worldwide, with HKU’s Regulatory Ramblings host Ajay Shamdasani.
Critics have dismissed correspondent banking as slow and outdated while praising stablecoins as faster and superior. But that narrative shifts the moment Swift brings blockchain into its rails, leading to improvement.
Separately, building on earlier pilots, Swift will also add the capability to support interoperability across existing and emerging systems for various use cases. “Developments are part of Swift’s strategy to power a best-in-class experience through innovation on parallel tracks – upgrading existing rails while creating future digital rails to maximize infrastructure choice for the industry.”
Monica and Musheer then share their thoughts on whether this can unlock interoperable tokenized bank deposits alongside other tokenized assets on SWIFT’s ledger. It is an open question as to whether the impact on global payments will be transformational or just a modification.
We then turn to Konrad to discuss his recently written paper. It is currently under review at Law and Geoeconomics and is closely related to the work done by HKU Law’s very own—and Regulatory Ramblings’ team leader—Prof. Douglas Arner—on the regionalization of payment systems.
Konrad’s paper discusses the extraterritorial frictions arising when policymakers seek to reconcile the payment systems of different countries. The main areas of friction are settlement finality, data protection, AML, and governance. In the paper, he proposes several institutional reforms aimed at reducing those frictions, namely – a model law on cross-border payment finality, narrowly tailored safe harbors for data sharing and an international payments forum under the auspices of august global bodies such as the Bank of International Settlements or the Financial Stability Board, though, as Ajay asks him: “Given that the BIS and FSB are legacy organizations that are slow to change, is that likely or prudent?”
The abstract to Konrad’s paper reads: “In 2020, the G20 placed cross-border payments at the top of the global financial agenda, spurring experiments to make transfers faster, cheaper, and more inclusive. Many build on instant or fast payment systems (FPS), yet linking infrastructures is as much a legal and geopolitical challenge as a technological one. When systems interconnect, they project domestic law across borders, generating extraterritorial frictions and giving rise to sovereignty concerns. This article compares three models of FPS interlinking—bilateral links, multilateral hubs, and direct access arrangements—showing how each produces frictions around settlement finality, AML/CFT and sanctions compliance, data protection, and governance. It then considers various policy proposals aimed at reducing these frictions, such as prefunding of accounts and the use of privacy-enhancing technologies. The analysis shows that technical fixes cannot resolve the structural frictions of cross-border payments, supporting the view that payment infrastructures embody sovereignty and that integration will likely proceed through regional blocs rather than a single global framework.”
He shares with Ajay why he chose to write his article now and what he thinks it adds to the existing literature on payments. Konrad elaborates on the three interlinking models of FPS — bilateral links, multilateral hubs, and direct access arrangements — delineated in his piece. He discusses how each produces frictions around settlement finality, AML/CFT and sanctions compliance, data protection, and governance.
Konrad acknowledges there are drawbacks to the multilateral model. That harmonization of law is often impeded because everyone must agree to the rules, which sometimes come up against rigid notions of sovereignty and regulatory ‘turf wars’ for some countries.
He concludes by saying that regional payment blocks will likely define the future, and how these different blocks interact will be key as regional payment infrastructures continue to improve.
“Regional payment blocks seem to be a way to circumvent sanctions, which are geopolitical weapons,” Konrad says. “That is why regional blocks will emerge, [because] people will disagree on what will be sanctioned. Ultimately, it is a political question, not a technical fix.”
Regulatory Ramblings podcasts is brought to you by The University of Hong Kong – Reg/Tech Lab, HKU-SCF Fintech Academy, Asia Global Institute, and HKU-edX Professional Certificate in Fintech, with support from the HKU Faculty of Law.
Useful links in this episode:
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Follow Syed Musheer Ahmed on LinkedIn
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Follow Monica Jasuja on LinkedIn
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Follow M. Konrad Borowicz on LinkedIn
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Post by Syed Musheer Ahmed: Swift to integrate blockchain ledger for global finance
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Post by M. Konrad Borowicz on: Extraterritorial Frictions in the Law of Cross-Border Payments
You might also be interested in:
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Must have book by Ross Buckley, Douglas Arner & Dirk Zetzsche – FinTech: Finance, Technology & Regulation
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Building Better Financial Systems: FinTech Sustainability – Research
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HKU-SCF Fintech Academy – website
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Asia Global Institute – website
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Most sought after Fintech course on edX – Introduction to Fintech
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