The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

Deltec Bank & Trust’s chairman yesterday asserted that traditional financial services providers have a “duty” to help innovators in the digital assets and crypto currency space.

Jean Chalopin, speaking at the FTX Crypto Bahamas Conference, said the Bahamas-based institution is tackling FinTech (financial technology) innovation head-on. He said: “I think we should all care about the future because we would all like to make more money, so if we don’t care about the future, we are really stupid.

“So the future is fascinating and today we see an acceleration of everything. We see AI [Artificial Intelligence] supporting crypto, crypto supporting quantum, quantum supporting biotechs. It’s a merging of innovation that accelerates innovation and I think it’s fascinating.

He continued: “I want to be in the future. I want to be part of the future, and banking is very important. Maybe that’s the most important part of what Deltec wants to do. Because when you’re an innovator, by definition, you do something new; you create disruption.

“We are in the stage of trusting disruption. So if you create disruption, you somehow break or create an issue with what is the established, conservative world, and it frightens the people and being frightened is what people in crypto know very well.”

Digital assets and their use are evolving at a rapid pace. While the security of blockchain has somtimes been questioned, as the technology develops it is becoming more and more mainstream. Different digital coin or token offerings are coming to the market on a regular basis with new security features that the entire blockchain system can learn from.

Mr Chalopin added that crypto “is much easier to trace than anything else”, and urged bankers to move past this “preconceived idea” that digital assets are unsafe compared to regular fiat currency. “Because we’re a bank, we also do insurance and we do a number of services around that,” he explained.

“It’s our duty to help the innovator. It’s our role to help the innovator and to help innovation, because if we do that, we help them to focus on mostly what they can do the best, which is innovation instead of spending 90 percent of the time in regulatory matters and governance. So we can help a lot.

“We feel that we have a function and a role to really embrace the future, and crypto is part of the future. Crypto is not going to disappear. There may be some ups and downs, like the Internet and the dot.com bubble, but the Internet is still here and is behind crypto to all converge again.”