At a time when banks across nations are mostly apprehensive about crypto, higher executives in some banks beg to differ for that matter. Recently, the CEO of the largest bank in Southeast Asia, DBS Bank has said that crypto can become an alternative to Gold.
DBS Bank CEO Piyush Gupta talked about crypto and its regulation during the Economic Times Global Business Summit. During the event, Piyush said:
“I don’t think that cryptocurrencies will become money as we know it, but it can be an alternative to gold and its value.“
In addition to that, he said:
“The other big challenge [of cryptocurrencies] is volatility in value. If you want to use this to pay for something, you don’t know what it’s costing you. Today cryptos are a potential source of speculated value, it’s unlikely that this is a source of money as we know it.”
Moreover, the executive said that central banks across the world need to bring crypto into the regulated space. In this context, he said:
“Regulating it out of the formal banking system is an unwise thing to do, as you wish to push it out into the unregulated space and then you have no way of creating any guard rails.“
Besides talking about crypto, the CEO also talked about central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). According to him, CBDCs will come with their own “set of challenges if you go direct, every citizen opens a direct account with the central bank and it disburses the CBDC directly.”
The CEO said:
“The downside of this is it will disintermediate the existing banking system, therefore you make the process of credit creation the onus and responsibility of the central bank alone and they don’t want that.“
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