An opportunity for a fundamental shift in the architecture of the financial systems

Cyber Financial Expert Amnon Samid presents his insights from Point Zero Forum (PZF) 2026 in Zürich, where regulators, central banks, and industry leaders presented outstanding contributions to the current debate about reshaping money, payments, and finance.    

Quick take

The future of finance will be built on interoperability, global connectivity, data protection, integration, auditability and accountability, and above all on future-proof trust.

Trust is not hinged only on the reputation of the issuer, but also on regulations and rule books. Trust requires being cyber-resilient at the core design level. This is the weakest and most vulnerable link in all payment platforms today, and it does not receive the attention it deserves.

The view should not be only from a purely economic/financial perspective, but also how to enable a more comfortable life for people everywhere, contributing to greater equality, prosperity, and welfare.

The hard part is still ahead of us. To introduce trusted money that can be validated through a trusted means of authentication and transfer (underneath infrastructure).

We need to see beyond the world we live in. Innovation is picking up pace. Solutions for ensuring financial landscape resilience and users' well-being and privacy, which we now have, were not available when all projects presented at the PZF were designed.

The main reason for me to attend the PZF, apart from catching up with so many people working in this space, was to convey these messages and show how more responsible solutions can be implemented practically, in a more efficient and secure manner than the future financial rails that are being built.

Is this at the forefront of the minds of the leaders of the various projects?

A glimpse into PZF 2026 discussions

The PZF projected a powerful macro perspective on the exponential change that the finance and payment industry is going through, with technology advancement, clearer regulations, and a glimpse of the agentic infrastructure. There was a clear indicator that institutional finance prefers tokenised deposits over stablecoins that do not need intermediaries.

The outcome of the Agentic-Leap panel was less optimistic, despite esteemed panellists Nicolas de Skowronski, Dr. Jochen Papenbrock, Giuliano Benjamin Clark, Pei Ling Tin, Ian Rogers, and Arjun Vir Singh. According to cited estimates, roughly 95% of generative-AI pilots deliver no measurable financial return, and the majority of agentic proofs-of-concept never reach production at all. Adopting the tech at scale is still difficult.

In a fireside chat with Emma Butterworth, Head of Financial Market Infrastructure Innovation and Payments Policy at the Bank of England, Mr Tommaso Mancini-Griffoli, Head of the BIS Innovation Hub, discussed the opportunities and challenges central banks face with emerging technologies like tokenisation and AI.

On the subject of the digital euro, it was interesting to hear similar voices to those we have been hearing since 2014 in our work on the digital yuan. The Chinese seem to have gone through a much more pluralistic and open-minded process than the ECB when considering the design of their central public digital currency, reflecting a more professional perspective. 

We are entering a multi-technology, multi-assets, multi-forms of money, and multi-underlying financial platforms (‘rails’).  

This opens an opportunity for innovation and for competition - who offers more benefits to users, not only to issuers of money.

Without interoperability and without taking care of the AI and the quantum threats at the design level, we risk fragmenting liquidity, increasing operational complexity, and compromising resilience and financial stability.

The priority is therefore not simply to build new digital infrastructures, but to ensure they work together and together with the financial system we trust.

Stablecoins vs. tokenized deposits: foes or interoperable?

The financial industry around stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and agentic payments got high momentum due to regulatory clarity and its focus on building more use cases.

An open challenge is identity - both of the money itself (adding identity to value) and on-chain identity, to enable payments without human approval. It should be solved to enable scale, in terms of technology and in terms of regulation.  

Most stablecoins are primarily used in markets where access to stable currency is limited, and dollar functionality can serve their local and cross-border needs. Almost no stablecoin issuer or tokenized deposit is targeting its product as a retail pay-token, with the ‘excuse’ of no beneficial business model.  

The stablecoin challenge was well presented by Circle’s Chief Strategy Officer, Dante Disparte, and the CEO of Ubyx, Tony McLaughlin.  

Tailwind for tokenization was evident at the PZF. Most bankers argued for tokenized deposits over stablecoins, as the latter are not fully backed and are not resilient without access to the central bank balance sheet.

The private sector argued that resilience through access to a central bank balance sheet is not necessary if stablecoins are identity-bearing value-based tokens, fully backed by fiat and redeemable 24/7.

The innovative Nick Kerigan from Swift presented how they are developing a shared ledger designed to enable tokenised deposits to scale globally through interoperability and settlement in central bank money.

Swift is a crucial contributor to Project Agorá, which was discussed in a roundtable moderated by Jessica Renier, Institute of International Finance, and Morten Bech, BIS Innovation Hub, with esteemed panelists from the ECB, Bank of England, Swiss National Bank, Mastercard, UBS, Deutsche Bank, MUFG, Visa, and Banque de France.

Agorá applies a unified ledger, aiming to enable policy-aware, atomic cross-border multi-currency settlements, while preserving the two-tier system of commercial bank and central bank money. It reflects an obvious narrative to put the tokenised deposit over stablecoins, due to its potential to eliminate intermediaries, which poses an existential question for banks' traditional role as the go-between in financial transactions.

Three questions about Agorá were raised in hallway honest discussions: (1) Does it serve end users or primarily the financial institutions? (2) Does it exploit the full potential of tokenisation? (3) Is it really making money future-proof?

The elephant in the room (spoiler: not just quantum)

Leading voices in quantum, like Dr. Philip Intallura, head of quantum at HSBC, and Vasily Pozdyshev from the BIS Innovation Hub, and others, sat down together for professional round table discussions on genuine quantum maturity and its capability of hacking encrypted financial systems, and shared how they read risk, spotting optimal proven solutions, including which milestones they treat as real. It was agreed that quantum readiness belongs in business continuity planning, not just the security roadmap.

The elephant in the room that didn’t get the proper attention is bracing for the emerging risks of artificial intelligence (AI) cryptanalytics tools in the hands of bad actors. The threat of AI-accelerated brute force is here already. It means that governments, central banks, and companies have less time to prepare contingencies to safeguard their data.

Integration of blockchain with legacy systems

Major financial institutions have been deploying private or permissioned blockchains, particularly in areas like cross-border payments, Know Your Customer (KYC) verification, and trade finance.

There are major challenges that blockchain cannot solve, including the platforms that are underway in the global banking sector, like Onyx, R3 Corda platform, Canton Network, and others. 
Widespread adoption of a blockchain-based platform faces significant hurdles. Technical challenges around scalability, as well as high energy consumption and concerns about privacy and data protection, remain barriers.

What else is there? 

RWA and deposit tokenisation, as well as stablecoins, have the potential to transform financial markets and payment systems, introducing both opportunities and risks.

There are clearly challenges with both permissionless and permissioned blockchains. More advanced architectures are required to provide the anchor of trust, resilience, and confidence for the monetary system.

It's imperative to have tech solutions for centralised public ledgers to overcome the DLTs' shortcomings, without losing any of their real benefits. It’s necessary for enabling autonomous direct instant value transfer from sender to receiver, with no risk to the receiver or issuer, and no ambiguity about where the money is at any given moment, while maintaining compliance and trust.

The LeVeL trusted Highway is a good candidate to fulfil this gap. Ready also for becoming infrastructure for the machine-to-machine economy, with daily M2M micropayments and continuous payments becoming a reality.  

The LeVeL trusted Highway overcomes most of blockchains’ hurdles and avoids their inherent tension between enhancing one aspect and inevitably compromising another, like security vs. scalability, or decentralization vs. security, while mitigating regulatory and compliance concerns.

The quantum and AI-cryptanalytics tamper-proof nature of LeVeL ensures tokens and transaction authenticity, making it nearly impossible for bad actors to manipulate data or distribute counterfeit tokens.

Anchoring trust in money – is there one size fits all?

A repeated claim at the PZF was that 'Different use cases require different solutions; there is no one size fits all.'

A smart delegate, Dr. Wolfram Seidemann, CEO of G+D currency technology, rightfully mentioned that the definition of money should be separated from the use case.

A claim that I fully agree with, as joint smart infrastructure can serve all use cases, apart from the fully offline use case, which requires a different authentication design that is not hinged on cryptography, if we wish to have finality of payment that is controlled by the receiver with no counterfeit risk.

The real transformation begins when value is represented as identity bearing quantum random tokens, which are usable by everyone and capable of moving across systems instantly from sender to receiver, with no risk to receiver or to issuer, and with no ambiguity where the money is at every single moment.

Andrea M Maechler, Deputy General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS argued that a tokenized system will need a trusted monetary anchor to settle financial transactions safely and efficiently. It also means addressing the limitations and risks of current stablecoin designs to achieve redeemability at par, robust governance, financial system Integrity, and appropriate regulatory measures.

Banks should store money in their servers as identity-bearing value, which will make it interoperable with any kind of identity-bearing digital money (like banknotes with value and serial number).

It is advisable for central banks to distinguish the nature of their future money from the practice of moving it about. The latter can be done and experimented with through the notion of payment fiat-denominated stablecoins (tokenized cash). 

The idea is to issue digital claim checks (IOUs) for the national currency as is and keep these claim checks with instant redemption ability. They can be introduced through commercial issuers, commercial banks, and PSPs, well regulated by the central bank.

Such fiat-denominated stablecoins can enter the payment space, compete with card schemes, reducing the price for the merchant, and make it more convenient for citizens to pay cash-like with their phone, and several other advantages, if it is done properly.

Considerations

Most of the projects presented and discussed at PZF don't meet the ultimate, responsible criteria required of the next generation of finance and payments.

Serving the next generation of customers and supporting businesses in a time of uncertainty in the quantum/AI age needs to be fundamentally rethought.

Our work explores how technologically advanced innovations could create and support a more competitive monetary system, obtaining trust, stability, efficiency, resilience, and interoperability, being future-ready, benefiting all citizens and businesses.

Greater competition in payment services and financial intermediation would emerge from advanced technologies and a more open monetary architecture.

Financial institutions and regulators should redefine the next generation of payments and finance, and the manner in which they assess risks. Artificial intelligence is at the centre of it, largely to make the process more efficient, but less attention is being paid to the potential attack vectors of AI tools in the hands of bad actors.

The institutions closest to these challenges need to look outward for answers. Innovative experts and small fintech companies are better positioned to be where the future of sustainable, resilient financial services is shaped, especially when it is becoming clearer that blockchains are not a reliable way to ensure trust and privacy in the age of AI.

Conclusions

1. Technological superiority and proven future-ready security are crucial for becoming a differentiator in an AI-driven world and for building trust and resilience.
2. Digital assets and stablecoins are gaining traction; however, prevailing token design and the underlying infrastructure (the 'rails') are currently limited in real-world use cases for individuals and businesses.
3. Cash will continue to be used alongside digital tokenised payment rails, as long as there is no digital bilateral private payment solution in offline mode that is not hinged on cryptographic credentials.

Bottom line:

We have an opportunity now for a fundamental shift in the architecture of the financial system and to make it future-ready.

The technology choices policymakers make today, including how to represent value in a digital form (e.g., value-based identity-bearing tokens) and the trusted underlying rails for autonomous simultaneous execution of authentication, clearing, and settlement (e.g., AI-resistant Quantum-secure public ledger, like the future-ready LeVeL platform), will shape whether tokenization strengthens the financial system or makes it more fragmented and vulnerable.

The outcome will be driven by decisions we make today.

About the author

 

Amnon Samid is an accomplished CEO and technology leader with decades of experience in strategic leadership and an entrepreneurial spirit that builds, disrupts, and reimagines what’s needed, even if it looks impossible.

Amnon combines global perspective with local understanding, now driving innovation at the intersection of technology, cybersecurity, AI, quantum, and finance, with a focus on real-world impact on reshaping money, payments, and lending for the common good.

As co-founder and CEO of BitMint AI-Cyber Innovation hub, Amnon leads the strategy of the new generation of pattern-devoid cryptography and the new generation of tokenisation, which is based on the simplest way to mint identity-bearing digital money to facilitate payment and storage, replacing the extra-complex coins and underlying infrastructure that dominate the market today.

The BitMint Universal Payment Solution supports a public ledger-based easy payment regimen among phones and other computing devices -- at quantum-grade security, with cash-like privacy; complemented with robust offline payment capability, and with Internet of Things device-to-device payment. The BitMint UPS is also metaverse-friendly. 

These initiatives reflect his commitment to empowering individuals, communities, businesses and States, through innovation, transparency, security, privacy and financial sovereignty.