In financial services, the front end of the world operates at super-high speeds: comparative advantages are measured in fractions of nanoseconds. And yet back end processes - the amount of time you have to wait when you sell a stock before cash hits your account - can take days.

Blythe Masters

Categorized in : You Wait World Time

I do believe CDSs [credit default swaps] have been miscast, much as poor workmen tend to blame their tools.

Blythe Masters

credit tools believe

Blockchain technology, or distributed ledger technology, is just a way of using the modern sciences of encryption to enable entities to share a common infrastructure for database retention.

Blythe Masters

blockchain just technology way

The blockchain is the financial challenge of our time. It is going to change the way that our financial world operates.

Blythe Masters

challenge change time world

Blockchain technology represents a generational opportunity to mutualize database infrastructure across entities within financial services. What that translates into is an enormous cost-saving, risk-reducing, and capital-enhancing opportunity.

Blythe Masters

blockchain technology opportunity

If you think about any multiparty process where shared information is necessary to the completion of transactions, and the coordination of activity and the exchange of value, that's where blockchain technology can be put to good use.

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value good you technology

The thing about innovation in financial markets is they're always building on what has come before. It's a natural process.

Blythe Masters

always building innovation process

A credit derivative, at its core, is actually a very simple concept... The simplest way to think of a credit derivative is it is analogous to insurance against the risk of a credit default by your counterparty, your business counterpart.

Blythe Masters

think business simple way

With private chains, you can have a completely known universe of transaction processors. That appeals to financial institutions that are wary of the bitcoin blockchain.

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blockchain you chains universe

Digital Asset has a revolutionary technology platform that eliminates the counterparty risk and lack of transparency that has hindered mainstream adoption of cryptographic technology.

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transparency digital risk technology

It is noticeable how many times you see a panel at a conference made up of all men or look into the audience and see very few women, whether it is an event focused on technology or business.

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women technology business men

I have a quantitative background, but really, derivatives appealed to me because they require so much creativity.

Blythe Masters

background because me creativity

In bypassing barriers between different classes, maturities, rating categories, debt seniority levels and so on, credit derivatives are creating enormous opportunities to exploit and profit from associated discontinuities in the pricing of credit risk.

Blythe Masters

opportunities debt credit risk

The credit derivative market would never have evolved but for the preexistence of the derivative markets because so much of the technology was borrowed.

Blythe Masters

because never credit technology

I think the most important thing to understand about credit derivatives and their use at JPMorgan is they served a number of different purposes. First and foremost, they were a tool which initially was seen as being useful in managing the bank's own risk management challenges.

Blythe Masters

own understand management challenges

You have to abide by the regulations that the regulators insist on. This is not a philosophical divide - it's a fact of life.

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divide fact you life

Distributed ledger technology is fashionable. In fact, if you could wear it, you'd put Ralph Lauren out of business, at least in my case.

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wear you technology business

Our view is that sensitive, contractual, market-moving, private data should be kept private.

Blythe Masters

our view sensitive data

I spent my whole career thinking about risk, markets, infrastructure, and regulation. I had seen the financial crisis unfold, and I had seen the credit derivatives market get operationally ahead of itself, which resulted in systemic risk counterparty exposures. I began to believe that distributed ledgers had the capability to tackle that problem.

Blythe Masters

career problem believe thinking

I've always been motivated to innovate where the implications are significant.

Blythe Masters

been where always motivated

Unfortunately, tools that transfer risk can also increase systemic risk if major counterparties fail to manage their own risk exposures properly.

Blythe Masters

fail own risk tools