As Barbados grapples with how to solve the fallout from the correspondent banking retreat from Latin America and the Caribbean, a fix could be found in the adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.
This was among the strategies advanced by Jerome Dwight, a top North American technology industry executive, investor, and author, as he led discussions on Tuesday at a virtual Banking and Wealth Management Industry webinar hosted by BIBA, the association for Global Business, titled: Unleashing Economic Potential in the Age of Web 3.0, Artificial Intelligence and the Metaverse.
BIBA is celebrating its 25th year and Executive Director, Carmel Haynes, said the event formed part of a series of activities over the year to commemorate the anniversary, which was focusing especially on where global business in Barbados would be heading over the next 25 years. Dwight is a former CEO of Bank of New York Mellon in Canada and Global Market Head at RBC International Wealth Management in Barbados.
He is the co-founder of BoomerangFX a SaaS (software as a service) company that launched the first end-to-end private healthcare practice solution powered by Artificial Intelligence.
In 2022, the company completed over US$20 million in Series A funding and has been recognized as one of the fastest growing healthcare SaaS solutions in North America.
Emphasising the growth and acceptance of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, he told local business executives that savvy billionaire investors such as Marc Cuban, as well as banks like Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America, were all moving to digital asset portfolios because that was where the world is going.
Dwight said despite the initial fears and uncertainty about the technology, it was being regarded as “the most safe infrastructure”. He cited the acceptance of cryptocurrency donations by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) as an important breakthrough in mainstreaming the technology.
Blockchain, he noted, is an open database that records transactions of who owns what, it is decentralised and no one party can control it. It cannot be tampered with and is shared across hundreds of thousands of computers that validate the transactions and is secured by cryptography. Moreover, it has never been hacked and so the core underlying infrastructure for Web 3.0, Dwight described as “solid”.
In this connection, he said moving money across borders in the traditional format was “incredibly inefficient”, costly and time consuming. Using the example of the billions of dollars in remittances from diaspora communities in North America, he said it can take seven to ten days to move and cost up to
10 per cent in fees.
“Now you can transfer funds instantly from one wallet to the other at pennies of the cost. When you think about the free flow of capital across borders, it solves the rampant inefficiencies,” Dwight asserted. He said moving money in and out of Barbados had become more constrained because of issues of correspondent banking, however, “the movement of capital using blockchain is instant, it is verified and secure, and that is the future”.
The investor and financial expert believes blockchain technology will make the free flow of capital timelier and more cost efficient for everyday users and added that “traditional banks that turned their backs on crypto and blockchain are now coming around”. In addition to solving inefficiencies, cryptocurrency and blockchain have the potential to address the more than two billion people who are unbanked and live on cash and bartering.
With the download of an e-wallet, the unbanked can begin saving digital money through a mobile phone app. “For emerging markets that are competing with more developed countries for financial services and are being systematically left out because of some of the rules being designed, this solves a lot of that,” he added. Dwight called for the designing of a strategy for the new economy that includes blockchain, artificial intelligence, and data science. He also urged regulators to embrace the new developments – creating the conditions for learning and best practices.
He also recommended the development of centres of excellence to attract entrepreneurial ventures, align technology, and integrate shared services with public infrastructure, and the creation of capital attraction programmes for international venture capitalists and high net worth individuals alongside local participants.
Following Dwight’s presentation, Derrick Cummins, president of BIBA, moderated a discussion involving Dwight and Praneil Ladwa, the Chief Product Officer and Head, International Operations at QuestGlobal Inc. based in Barbados, and Jason Kinch, the Director, Application Delivery Services, Digital and Client Experience at CIBC FirstCaribbean International Bank.They too agreed that the pieces of the puzzle were being shaped to exploit the technology but acknowledged there was a talent resource shortage in technology on the island that needed to be addressed. (PR)
