Transcriber: Nhu Vu.
Reviewer: Walaa Mohammed. Incredibly, incredibly excited to be here. Incredibly excited to hear from ACA. I was a very funny story when I saw the program. I've actually seen ACA before about four years ago in Sofia because my son was just about to be born. He’s out in the back trying to be quiet. And we see one of her lectures in Sofia, so really excited to see her again and even more excited to be here to talk to you. Occurrences. I have some slides. Excellent. So working for PaySafe and being an online company, it's giving me an incredible exposure to what are the trends in the payment industry and especially to what's happening in cryptocurrencies and how that evolution is going to impact more and more of what we. Apologies. Every time I move, I lose the mic, so I’ll just stay completely still. Um, so first of all, I'm going to start because a lot of people have asked, well.

you know, Jacomo Austin, that’s an odd
name for someone living in Verona. And how did you get here? Who are you? So I'd like to I don't know if you have
a clicker. Maybe I can. Yeah, Yeah. Uh, and do it. So just to give you a bit
of my background, I was born in Hamilton. Sorry. I have a lot of animations here
anyways. Born in Hamilton and Canada. Second of five kids. As he was saying,
large families, the traditional, the old way. And my father is Canadian. My
mother is Canadian of Italian descent. We moved to Seattle when I was five. I then we all moved to Italy
when I was ten to Bolzano, near the border with Austria. None of us knew any Italian, so we had
to learn Italian, which was fun. You know, as a kid, everything seems easy,
so you just go ahead and do it.

Then we moved to Rome from Bolzano. So moved and lived in Rome for ten years. Favorite place in the whole world. Amazing city. Then moved to Milan, spent a few months in Singapore, spent a few months in Dublin. Then moved then and moved to London with my gorgeous wife who is in the back as well. Worked there for a few years. And then finally we moved to Bulgaria. I moved to Sofia in 2014, got married in Sofia, had had our son in Sofia. And yeah, spent, spent seven years there. And then last year I had the amazing opportunity to move to Varna. And I said earlier, Rome is my favourite city, but I’m sorry. Varna is very close as well. It’s an amazing place. Amazing place. Yes. You had the opportunity because Pace Safe has grown so tremendously in Sofia and we have 1300 people there. That we decided to open another office in Bulgaria. And we wanted to come to Verona.

And we wanted to have one of
the directors of the company come and help open the office. So I got
the opportunity to be here, which is incredible. If you can skip on to the next slide. Talking a little bit about my experience, my background. So I studied business and economics
university in Rome. I speak Bulgarian fluently, as
well as Italian and English. So we can, if you want to come
up and ask afterwards, we can, we can use any of
these three languages. Spent six months in Singapore, Singapore
Management University, then did my masters in one year,
double in Milan, got a double degree masters in
international management with the University College of Dublin, hence
the Singapore and Dublin experiences. And then from a work perspective,
started in JP Morgan in London, went on to work with Capgemini, some
incredibly exciting projects there. I was in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia for
six months working with Labour.

moved on to BCS consulting, worked with HSBC for a couple
of years on financial markets, risk and compliance. And
then moved to Bulgaria. Worked with UniCredit
bank for a while and then joined Pay Safe in 2016. And yeah, as I mentioned, that's really
why I'm here because through that experience
with Pay Safe, I have a huge exposure to crypto and
to what that industry is doing. If we can go to the next slide, we talk about some of the partnerships between e-money
companies like Pay Safe and cryptocurrencies, and that's
really going to be the foundation of this talk. How
do we link these two things up in a better way? How do we make that work? The link between traditional finance and
new options like cryptocurrency. So you’ll see some of the
things that we’ve done as a company working with Coinbase,
with Binance, with other people in the industry.

In looking at the expansion
of crypto over the years. I mean, you see the chart here. 
Incredible, incredible growth, right? Just over the last three years,
the market cap. So the total of cryptocurrencies
has gone up ten times. If we look at five years,
look even farther back, it's gone up about 10,000 times, actually. So it's an incredible, incredible
growth story. But even so, you can see
here on the right, it just represents 0.4% of the
global financial market. So it's become much, much bigger. But it's still a tiny, tiny fraction
of the financial market overall. You can see the Bitcoin obviously
covers most of the volume. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the two
big blocks on the right. You then have a number of other coins
taking up other other market cap elements. You see there's a small section
of Stablecoins, so a Stablecoin is essentially a
cryptocurrency where the value of

the cryptocurrency is pegged to a stable
underlying asset, hence the coin. So in many cases, the stable underlying
asset is the US dollar, and we’re seeing more and more
stable coins, and they’ll be an important part of 
what we discussed later as well. Here you can see expansion in terms of
market players, who's in the market. You see a lot of new crypto exchanges. You see a lot of new decentralized
finance players. You see. So decentralized finance, by the way, is a fancy word in crypto for meaning
peer-to-peer lending, so decentralized so I can
lend to you my bitcoin, and you use them for your business,
for your development, for whatever it is that you need. And there’s a collateralization
of that as well. So it’s one of the new concepts
and elements in the crypto industry. If we can move on. Um, again, looking at the growth, looking
at the development of the industry.

Incredible to see also the movements
in cryptocurrency and how they're also somewhat
dictated by movements in the traditional stock market and
dictated by things like tweets. If you follow Elon Musk and
you see him tweet about Bitcoin or about Dogecoin or about
whatever, you see a number of. Thank you very much. Sorry about that.
I should have asked before. You see a number of direct correlations between 
Elon Musk’s tweets tweeting about Bitcoin or Crypto currency Doge
and the price going up and down. So very interesting to watch. Now we come to some of the challenges
of the industry and what the crypto industry needs to change
in order to get to that next level of growth. Right. We've seen gotten to 0.4%
of the global financial system. How does it get to 20% ? Right. What's
that next level of growth? So one of the blockers is traditional finance, right?

Banks, historically, a lot of nasty things about crypto, right? We've seen we've seen Jamie and Jamie Dimon call it a fraud, a scam, you know, unreliable. You know, you shouldn't spend any money on crypto, etcetera, etcetera. And that impacts the industry, obviously. On the other hand, we’ve seen a lot of positive movement, especially recently in the last year or two from traditional finance. So we see banks creating their own stablecoin, opening up crypto funds for retail investors to buy, creating partnerships with the industry. So we are seeing a gradual opening up of the crypto industry of the banking industry to cryptocurrencies. Now, banks are one of the difficult challenges. And the other difficult challenge is regulators. So then we come to some of the some of the threats to growth. And and these are the two major things which I'm which I'm concerned about

and which the crypto industry
needs to, to work. To give up and to overcome in order to
really reach that that huge next step of growth. One of them is anonymity. Right? The pseudonym. As we said. So the focus on not giving those personal
details, on not doing what we call KYC. Right? Your customer give me
an ID document where you are. They don't want to do that because
a lot of the crypto firms are are quite rebellious. 
Crypto is set up as a rebellion against the financial system. And so we don't want any
of that regulation. We don't want any of that KYC,
any of that other things. But that also drives some of those
regulatory and banking problems. So the regulators, the banks
need you to cooperate. You need to cooperate with those people, with those entities if you want to access
the broader, broader population. So that's one aspect. And the second
aspect is speculation.

And you might say you're crazy. You take away speculation from
crypto, and what's left, right? People buy a Bitcoin because they hope
the price goes up, and then they make a lot of money 
and they sell it, right? But that is not at all the initial
philosophy of crypto, and it's not actually even representative
of a currency, right? A currency is something that you
use to pay to a person or to an entity in order to receive
a good or service, right? It has this relatively stable value, and
you can use it interchangeably, right? Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin. 
These are not cryptocurrencies. These are crypto assets because you
usually, most people are buying and selling them in order to make money
off the price movements. So this is where the main focus from
my perspective going forward is on Stablecoins. Stablecoins do not have
fluctuations in prices, and you can use a stable coin. You might be a person
sitting off in Hyderabad in India.

and you're going to be studying in the
UK in the fall, and you can send a payment to a university in
the UK using Stablecoins. You don't have to use TransferWise
or bank accounts or a lot of intermediaries, right?
It’s straight there. There’s no intermediaries in
the crypto world, right? There's there's not a lot of fees, right? Obviously, if I'm paying from Hyderabad
to the UK, I've got my issuing bank, the correspondent bank, the recipient bank,
I might might be paying by card. So I've got Visa, I got Mastercard.
All these people are taking a cut. And with crypto it's just one. And that's the blockchain, which takes an incredibly small fee in
order to keep what they call gas fees to keep the transaction moving. So those are the two things that
the industry needs to move on from in order to unlock
that next level. And the final point I want to make here
is around looking at new uses

we've seen very recently, we've seen NFTs
come out as an incredible use for crypto, right? The unique identifier
of a digital asset. But you can expand that logic. You can use smart contracts in crypto
to facilitate the sale of houses. For example, why do we need so
many intermediaries when we sell a house or when we buy a house?
We need a notary. We need a real estate agent, right? We need all these people because we don't
trust the person on the other side. We don't trust the stranger
to give us help. So, and I don't want to pay if I don't
know that I'm going to get the house, right? But with smart
contracts on the blockchain, you can actually have that level of trust. You can level of checks that this person actually owns the house and
this person actually has the money and they’ve exchanged and now the
transaction is finished, right?

Without intermediaries, again, making
it all very cheap for everyone. Stablecoins, as I mentioned earlier, that
this can replace traditional payments. It absolutely can, and it should
replace traditional payments. We should disintermediate that 
in the industry. I’ve also seen incredible
uses with Ukraine. Now we’ve seen within hours of setting up crypto addresses for donations to humanitarian or
military scope in Ukraine, there were millions of dollars in
an account ready to be used. This couldn't work with traditional
finance. It would take weeks. It would take months to get all
that organized and everything. Whereas crowdfunding with crypto has taken a very, very short amount of time. And even
finally for inflation as well. We've seen this in Nigeria last year, huge
inflation in the local currency. People are losing value with their
money, and they put it into crypto and crypto is saving the
value of their money.

They're able to use it as a hedge against inflation. So there's a lot of incredible uses of cryptocurrency. I'm incredibly excited about this industry. There are some challenges the industry needs to move past in order to unlock that growth potential. And I just ran out of time. So thank you all very much for paying attention.

The future of payment services | Giacomo Austin | TEDxMladost

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The future of payment services | Giacomo Austin | TEDxMladost

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