Bridging the Gap Between Capital Markets and Crypto (Breakpoint 2024)

0:01Picture yourself on a beach, retired early and enjoying financial freedom. If this is your dream, then now's the time to level up your investing game, and Real Vision can help you. We arm you with the knowledge, the tools, and the network to succeed on your financial journey on your own terms. Take control of your future and visit realvision.com forward slash free. That's realvision.com forward slash free. Hey, everyone. But as you know, Solana is one of the ecosystems I'm the most interested in. I've been incredibly bullish. I love to see the vibrancy of what is happening in the space. Unfortunately, I couldn't make Breakpoint this year, but the stories have been amazing.

0:48I heard the talks are incredible, and we're really proud of Real Vision to give you talks from Solana Breakpoint 2024 in Singapore. I really hope you enjoy them.

1:08Hi everyone, thanks for having me here. A little bit of a word about myself before I talk about the cool products that we're doing at Societe General Forge. So I've been studying capital markets a long time ago, spent more than 10 years at JP Morgan. My last role was head of equities and equity derivatives for the private bank in Asia Pacific. 2017, I left the bank, decided to become an entrepreneur in the blockchain space, and did the first ever structured product to clear settle because it did on the public blockchain. Basically doing RWA before RWA was even a world. It was way too early, so I switched, went to Coinbase, spent three years as head of institutional sales for Asia Pacific and EMEA.

1:50And six months ago, I decided it was time to come back to the banking world, come back into RWA, and put all my energy into growing that business. So I joined SG Forge, which is a subsidiary of Societe Generale, one of the largest systemic banks in Europe, which is also 160 years old, basically making me a suit and a dinosaur. What we're doing at Societe Generale Forge, we're a fully-owned subsidiary of Societe Generale, and we're dedicated to digital assets. We've been tokenizing securities since 2020 and the first big achievement that we had was to be the lead of the syndicate for the tokenization of the European Investment Bank bond which was a 100 million euro bond.

2:35Other persons in the syndicates were Goldman Sachs and a large bank in Spain. Since then we've been tokenizing more bonds, more structured products which is one of the core business of our investment bank. And if you fast forward until the beginning of this year, we decided to push the envelope even further. And essentially tokenized the investment leg. Instead of investing into this tokenized product with cash, we wanted to offer a settlement instrument in order to do so more automatically and more efficiently. So we launched a stablecoin that is called EuroCV. and that we use for the investment into the bond that we issued at the beginning of this year, which was a green bond issued by the bank and sold to a big insurer in France.

3:24Talking about the stablecoin, this stablecoin is the first Mika-compliant stablecoin that is issued by a bank. as we received the EMI license in Europe we also decided that we wanted to make it permissionless and fully transferable so there are like three different use cases for this stablecoin and we're working on these three verticals at the same time the first one I mentioned like using it as a settlement instrument for all the products that we and other asset managers and other banks are bringing on chain It's a settlement instrument, but it also can be used as a lifecycle management instrument.

4:07Imagine paying your coupons directly with a stablecoin, and at maturity of the product, automatically repaying the notional plus accrued payments to the investors automatically. The second use case is working with corporates, corporates and their treasury desk, in order for them to transfer value 24-7, cross-border, instantaneously and very cheaply. We're also working with them using programmatic money in a way for them to be able to basically better manage their liquidity intraday. And finally, the very interesting use case, and that's the reason why we're here, is making the stablecoin available in the crypto world.

4:46As an on and off ramp for people who want to have an investment-grade stablecoin to enter into that ecosystem, but also to make it available in the DeFi space. liquidity pools, being able to use it in lending, and also being able to use it in indexes. And that's the reason why I'm here as well today. We really believe that the future is multi-chain, and we have been very careful in choosing which next chain to use for the deployment of that stablecoin, and obviously it has been Solana. A few reasons for that. Obviously, from a technical point of view, low latency, very high throughput, and very low cost was something that is very important to us.

5:30But it's also like the ecosystem. To me, the ecosystem is growing very fast. We see more and more developers coming to this chain. And we also had amazing discussions with the people at the foundation. It was really a pleasure to work with them and very, very efficient as well. Having said that, we're not planning to just stay on Stablecoin and bring only Stablecoin to Solana. We have been tokenizing more securities. They are here on the slide talking about smart cash, which is a structured product Which has a pair that is very similar to money market fund Structured products which are investment solutions consisting of bonds and derivatives packaged together and that's really investment solutions That we would plan to bring as well if there are good use cases and finally bonds to me the the importance of blockchain technology and financial markets, the two are going to converge in one place which I believe is going to be DeFi.

6:29I think Solana has the perfect ecosystem for that and hopefully there's going to be a lot of builders who are going to help us do what we're trying to achieve. So just a call for action here. Please, we're not trying to build everything ourselves. We would like to have all the builders come to us, present what they're trying to do and see if we can do something together. My email is here. And thank you very much for giving me the time.

7:05Picture yourself on a beach, retired early and enjoying financial freedom. If this is your dream, then now's the time to level up your investing game and Real Vision can help you. We arm you with the knowledge, the tools, and the network to succeed on your financial journey on your own terms. Take control of your future and visit realvision.com forward slash free. That's realvision.com forward slash free.