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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “Waiting and seeing is not a strategy.” A senior partner and global banking lead at BCG just put a number on the thing every bank CEO is nervous about: up to 15% of bank revenue and 30% of profits at risk by 2035. But the opportunity is bigger than the threat. His name is Christian Schmid, Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG, where he leads the global banking business. He is the lead author of BCG’s biggest ever digital assets report, The Future of Digital Assets. He calls the whole shift the iPhone of money, and he thinks the real fight is not stablecoins versus deposits. It is who owns the screen the customer taps. About Christian Schmid: Christian Schmid is a Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG, based in Zurich, where he leads the firm’s global commercial banking, capital markets and invest
I spoke with a bank executive this week about where the attention is going. “AI is the only focus.” That captures the mood. Crypto is in a bear market. The excitement has moved elsewhere. But here’s one number that stopped me this week: 80 seconds. That’s how long it took some of the world’s biggest banks to settle a cross-border payment in the BIS Project Agorá test. But what settled wasn’t a stablecoin. It was tokenized central bank reserves and bank deposits. Here’s what matters, though: Banks aren’t chasing speed; they’re defending the deposit. When money settles in a stablecoin, it leaves the balance sheet, and deposits are what fund the lending business. A tokenized deposit is the same dollar, still on the bank’s books, now programmable. This week’s signals at a glance: * The world’s biggest banks settled cross-border payments in 80 seconds * BNY is moving $8.6 trillion of fund rec
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