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Regulation, technology, and process innovation are reshaping the market landscape. While regulatory reform precipitated these changes, technology, operating models, risk management, and efficiency are the real drivers. The trading business is shifting to newer and more adroit trading firms bridging traditional asset management liquidity pools with private and hedge fund capital.

"Libra has undoubtedly been a wake-up call for central banks to strengthen their efforts to improve existing payment systems. This by itself is undoubtedly a win-win situation for the global community. Progress made by those central banks already operating at the technological frontier can be expected to increase the speed of technological diffusion across borders."

The US House of Representatives passed the "Advancing Innovation To Assist Law Enforcement Act" to require the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to conduct a study on the use of blockchain, AI, and other technologies by the agency and provide a report to the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee.

The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) has published its submission to the Senate Select Committee on Financial Technology and Regulatory Technology. The submission outlines how APRA is evolving its regulatory framework and approach to support the developing FinTech and RegTech sector, while ensuring risks are appropriate managed in line with APRA's mandate of financial soundness and stability.

The Deutsche Bundesbank and Deutsche Börse have presented the results of a concept study on the use of distributed ledger technology (DLT) in the area of collateral management. This study outlines that, in principle, DLT is capable of delivering further benefits in terms of the velocity and usability of collateral. The two institutions are thus continuing their successful cooperation in researching the capabilities offered by securities settlement based on DLT technology.

"Technological change does not follow its own direction, but rather is shaped by moral frames, incentives, and power. If we think more about how innovation can be directed to serve society, we can afford to worry less about how we should adjust to it."

A Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence report sheds further light on the impact that technology is having on the role of compliance within financial service firms. It highlights the ebb and flow of attitudes on the adoption and use, in practice, of technology in financial services. It also examines the shifting role of the regulator and global concerns over tackling rising cyber-risk.

Carmelle Cadet, Founder and CEO of EMTECH, a modern central bank technology and services company, is a technology provider in the world's first live retail CBDC with the Central Bank of Bahamas called the Sand Dollar.

Singapore has been named the world's top nation in terms of digital adoption and which showcases the most favorable environment for digitalization, according to Cisco's annual Digital Readiness Index. The index, which measures digital readiness of countries based on seven components: ease of doing business, human capital, startup environment, technology adoption and technology infrastructure, ranked Singapore as the world's most well prepared country for digitalization.

Although the BoE has said crypto-assets don't meet the necessary criteria to be considered money, CBDC analyst Ben Dyson said, "that doesn't mean that it's impossible for somebody to improve upon that technology and create something that much better fulfills the qualities of money... We've seen proposals over the last year from large technology firms, for example, to build payments systems and crypto-assets that could function more as stable money."

The purpose of the study is to identify and explore different applications of blockchain technology in supply chain management and suggest a framework for their analysis. The study addresses researchers' conflicting opinions regarding the hype of blockchain and clarifies which minor applications are hyped and which are currently more applicable.

The Coupon Bureau is a non-profit, industry-managed coupon data exchange technology platform that works with many of the largest players in the retail ecosystem. The decision to use Hedera Consensus Service to provide a real-time, tamper-proof log for all coupon events on its platform, will allow coupon providers, manufacturers, clearinghouses, and retailers the ability to validate in real-time when coupons are registered and redeemed on the platform, without having to trust any single party.

The G20 and the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub launched the G20 TechSprint Initiative to highlight the potential for new technologies to resolve regulatory compliance (RegTech) and supervision (SupTech) challenges. The BIS Innovation Hub published high-priority RegTech/SupTech operational problems and invited private firms to develop innovative technological solutions. The problem statements identify challenges in regulatory reporting, analytics, and monitoring and supervision, and have been developed from submissions received from Financial Stability Board member jurisdictions.

An R3 white explores proposed CBDC models and applications from across the globe, and examines technologies for different implementations based on recent engagements with central banks and payment infrastructure providers. It discusses use cases that CBDCs are solving, the benefits they may unlock, minimum viable ecosystems, the difference between the hybrid, synthetic and direct models, and the technologies, including blockchain, that are being considered.

Eleven members of Congress are calling on the U.S. Treasury Department to look at new technologies, including blockchain and distributed ledger technology, to help streamline how cash and supplies are distributed under a federal law trying to boost the economy during the COVID-19 crisis.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) looks to be going after decentralized finance (DeFi) applications in their recent draft guidance released. When it comes to DeFi platforms, the FATF said its standards may not apply to the underlying software or technology, but entities involved with the decentralized application (DApp) such as owners or operators may now be considered virtual asset service providers (VASPs). Virtual asset (VA) escrow services, including services involving smart contract technology, brokerage services, order-book exchange services, advanced trading services, and custody providers will all considered VASPs.

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) have been high on policy makers' agenda for the past few years. Numerous central banks around the world have issued reports on the viability, use cases and even potential structures for a tokenised or account-based form of central bank money, based on distributed ledger technology or existing technology. The theory has largely been proved to be effective and now it is time to bring these CBDCs to life.

A group of 11 banks, including NatWest and Deutsche Bank, have been trialling a distributed ledger technology (DLT) based platform for intraday FX swaps. The trial used technology from Finteum, which has been working on a DLT-based intraday FX swaps platform first announced with R3 and Fnality in 2019. During the trial, the banks engaged in simulated trading and discussion sessions. The plan now is to move to live transactions later this year or early in 2022.

Standard Chartered's innovation arm, SC Ventures, will establish a crypto-asset brokerage and exchange platform, in a joint venture with BC Technology Group, a Hong Kong-based investment company specializing in digital assets. BC Technology operates OSL, the first crypto-asset exchange to be licensed by Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission. The new exchange platform and service will be based in the UK and target the European institutional investor market. It plans to launch the new service in the fourth quarter. This comes shortly after HSBC said it has no plans to launch a bitcoin trading desk or any other crypto-asset services.

"The solution based on blockchain technology that has been developed and tested by the Riksbank in its e-krona project provides new possibilities, but is also new and needs further investigation. This is one of the lessons learned as described in the e-krona pilot project's report on its first phase. The e-krona pilot has the objective of testing a proposal for a technical solution to increase the Riksbank's knowledge of how an e-krona could function and be used as a complement to cash... One important question is whether the e-krona will function even without access to the internet, what is known as off-line functionality, a possibility the project has not yet tested.