Chris Hamilton

Founder at Hamilton Platform

Message Posts: 0 Comments: 3

Bio I am building my own independent consultancy to assist developing economies with challenges in national payments infrastructure design Career History I've spent nearly 30 years working in financial markets infrastructure, particularly equities clearing and settlement and national payments systems. Along the way, I've led the national payments companies for Australia and South Africa, and developed the business design for two national payments systems from scratch.

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Mir breaks Visa-Mastercard duopoly in Russia

Adoption challanges are huge, as has been observed, because of the massive network effects in retail payments. Incumbent networks don't have to be good, they just have to be ubiquitous. But the real problem here is one of time relative to the technology cycle. If like me you follow developments in card, realtime payments AND crypto (in my experieince surprisingly few professionals do) you will have observed that the three are operating in parallel universes. National card companies are (with honourable exceptions) continuing to fight the last war against Visa and MasterCard, while realtime services are rolling out everywhere, as banks seek to respond to challanges from Telcos and fintechs. Central banks think the future is all about CBDC; and of course private crypto thinks the world belongs to it. So I think the best thing a regulator and community could do is agree on the overall market structure and evolutionary path. If these streams are to compete, or at least co-exist, this should be clearly annunciated as policy; otherwise banks, telcos and others will waste a great deal of development effort; and if different players choose different things to work on, the alarming possibility is that none of them reaches critical mass.

02 Jun 2021 Reply Read article

Why a decision on UK CBDC comes down to robust use-cases

Thanks Andy. look forward to the paper - it looks like BIS has just published something too.

20 May 2021 Reply Read article

Why a decision on UK CBDC comes down to robust use-cases

While I have huge respect for Andy and what he's achieved, on this occasion I beg to differ. I don't think it helps the CBDC discussion very much to think about it in terms of use cases. there are both "negative" and "positive" reasons for this: 1. at least in a developed economy, any single use case you come up with can be met without the need for a complete disruption of the entire existing system - which is what CBDC would represent; 2.from long experieince, it seems that any systemic reform cannot rely for the business case on one or a few use cases. This makes sense when you think about it: by their nature, systemic reforms are focused on future use cases which are hard to envisage simply because they aren't possible right now. If you pick a few, its too easy to convince yourself the thing can be dome more easily another way. Once the decision has been made to implement a systemic reform, the choice of implementation path can and should be guided by low hanging fruit in terms of use cases. But not the "whether to do it" question; 3. In fact there is a policy imperative that has little to do with use cases as such and much more to do with the central bank retaining effective microeconimic levers over the financial system for which they are responsible. As cash disappears, the central bank loses the ability to directly infuence the money flow. No central bank can feel comfortable letting this happen. 4. Depending on design choices, I think central banks are grossly underestimating the challenge of bringing in a widely traded retail CBDC. And if you design out the challenges, you trade off the scope and utility of the CBDC. There's no doubt genuine innovation opportunities would arise from a well-designed retail CBDC. But the network effects working against wide uptake are enormous. I have not yet heard really strong explanation for how those effects are to be overcome. None of this should be read as a polemic against CBDCs - in fact I'm pretty sure they are inevitable. But unless we do the design realyl well, and have a really strong, patient implementation plan, we risk wasting a lot of money.

17 May 2021 Reply Read article