Goldman Sachs has named a new global head of digital assets, who has a radical vision for financial markets and is putting pressure on Wall Street’s digital future.
Mathew McDermott is no newcomer and has previously worked as an ex head of Cross Asset Financing, and with his new position at Goldman, he comes up with a radical vision for the financial markets. Mathew is aware that in the future, all of the world’s financial assets will be based on electronic ledgers and comes up with solutions.
He presents his view on the matter in an interview for CNBC and said:
In the next five to 10 years, you could see a financial system where all assets and liabilities are native to a blockchain, with all transactions natively happening on chain,
So what you’re doing today in the physical world, you just do digitally, creating huge efficiencies. And that can be debt issuances, securitization, loan origination; essentially you’ll have a digital financial markets ecosystem, the options are pretty vast.
After joining Mathew also expanding his team and doubling the number of employees for Asia and Europe.
Mathew has also been talking about having short-term goals and more ambitious projects that have clear business value.
First up is helping the essential plumbing of finance like repurchase agreements, known as the repo market, go digital
Mathew said in a response to banks and hedge funds, they rely on short-term financing of daily operations where the daily volume is more than $ 1 trillion.
McDermott next adds:
In securities finance and repo, if you look at those markets, they’re ripe for standardization,
There’s a lot of legacy processes in the vast movement of collateral that makes them very cost inefficient, so by leveraging distributed ledger technology, you can standardize processes to manage collateral across the system, and you have a much more efficient settlement process given the real time settlement.
As part of this vision, Mathew also spends a lot of time with other large companies such as JPMorgan and Facebook, which also work intensively on cryptocurrencies and developing a regulatory-compliant strategy. In the interview, he also indicated that one project is bound by direct cooperation with JPMorgan, which was already to create a JPM coin, which is pegged to the US dollar in order to pay for transactions that migrate to the blockchain.
Goldman Sachs and his attitude to his own Cryptocurrency
We are exploring the commercial viability of creating our own fiat digital token, but it’s early days as we continue to work through the potential use cases.
In conclusion, Mathew acknowledges the truly growing interest of institutional clients in cryptocurrencies, and therefore Goldman Sachs’ digital assets department has a clear vision.
Goldman Sachs is one of the largest investment banking enterprises in the world.