2025 Concordia Annual Summit

Frictionless Finance: Unlocking Capital Through Digital Assets

  • Global Economy & Trade
Julie Hyman, Peter Knez, Jeremy Almond, Elisabeth Carpenter

Session
Partners

Session Summary

Important
Quotations

"When you think about sending money across borders, it takes time, costs a lot, and is cumbersome. With a digital dollar, you can send money around the world instantly in digital form."
Julie Hyman
"This is the biggest transformation of my professional career, probably a once-in-a-century shift, combining digital, AI, computational, energy, and geopolitical transformations."
Peter Knez
"This technology is an access technology. That access will dramatically transform supply chains and the financial health of the people using them."
Jeremy Almond
"You can imbue a dollar with the superpowers of the internet. That digital dollar can move around the world with ease, making transactions as simple, safe, secure, and inexpensive as sending a WhatsApp message."
Elisabeth Carpenter

Key
Takeaways

  • Financial Inclusion & Democratization: Digital assets enable financial inclusion for billions of unbanked people globally, particularly in the global south where traditional banking infrastructure is inaccessible due to KYC and remote access issues. 99% of small businesses lack venture backing, and digital assets create new pathways for credit markets and lending by connecting borrowers and lenders directly.

 

  • Supply Chain Transformation: Current supply chains demonstrate stark inequality – Indonesian farmers receive 8 cents for products selling at $8 globally due to intermediaries. Digital assets serve as “access technology” that can eliminate these inefficiencies. Additionally, 50% of US commercial payments still use checks and pre-internet Federal Reserve systems 8, while blockchain enables money movement at light speed with programmable functionality.

 

  • Global Trade Evolution: The emergence of sovereign-supported gold-backed stablecoins in the global south signals a shift from traditional “give us your gold, here’s our paper” dynamics to new south-south trade based on digital settlement layers. Circle has already enabled over $25 million in aid distribution with smart contracts ensuring appropriate fund usage and up to 40% cost savings.

Action
Items

  • Immediate: Launch blockchain-based financial inclusion pilots, focusing on indigenous populations and migrant workers through payment systems, DeFi lending for small businesses, and humanitarian stablecoin distribution with aid organizations.


  • Medium-term: Build the foundations of digital market infrastructure, tokenizing private assets, enabling direct-to-market agricultural platforms, and creating regulatory frameworks to strengthen institutional trust in digital assets.

 

  • Long-term: Advance global financial transformation, supporting gold-backed stablecoins for south-south trade, expanding programs like “My First Bitcoin,” using AI for multilingual financial education, and replacing outdated payment systems with blockchain alternatives.

 

  • Success Metrics: Measure progress through reduced unbanked populations, expanded producer market access, greater small business financing, faster and cheaper cross-border transactions, and improved transparency in aid distribution.

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