“Cashless” Rich Turrin, DigFin VOX, Ep 12

Richard Turrin is a consultant and author based in Shanghai. He began his career on investment banking trading floors. From 2013 to 2016 he worked at IBM’s artificial unit, Watson, where he was in charge of its Asia-Pacific fintech operations.

His latest book is “Cashless: China’s Digital Currency Revolution”. He joins DigFin’s Jame DiBiasio to talk about the key themes of the book, including the nature and design of central-bank digital currencies (CBDCs), their uses, and their development in the context of China’s fintech story.

Perhaps most pointedly, Turrin identifies which parts of financial services have the most to gain from the advent of CBDCs – and which have the most to lose.

• Timecodes:
• 0:00 – Richard Turrin, “Cashless”
• 01:08 – What makes central-bank digital currencies (CBDCs) useful
• 4:11 – CBDCs versus our existing payments infrastructure
• 5:41 – Use cases, benefits of digital currencies
• 9:47 – Financial services in a world of digital currencies
• 12:00 – Governments and programmable money
• 15:07 – Cryptocurrency (eg Bitcoin) versus CBDCs
• 16:39 – Role of commercial banks
• 19:00 – Disrupting credit card companies and payments fintech companies
• 22:16 – The role of CBDCs in tokenizing assets
• 25:00 – Cybersecurity of digital cash