NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Friday, October 17, 2014

Earlier this month, Gates Foundation co-chair Bill Gates implored bankers at the Sibos conference in Boston to get on the financial-inclusion bandwagon and consider digital payment and identification technologies as workarounds for the problems faced by the 2.5 billion “unbanked” adults in the developing world.

Now, courtesy of Coindesk, we’ve (belatedly) discovered that Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer moderated a panel on the topic last week at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank’s annual general meetings in Washington, the granddaddy of international policy talkfests. One of the panelists even uttered the words “distributed ledger-type technology,” a nod to the core blockchain idea that underpins bitcoin.

Those words came from Standard Chartered Chief Executive Peter Sands, who talked of how this kind of technology could be used to electronically transfer titles to houses and cars in a “massively more efficient” way than the current approach.