What convinced you that it was still possible to reinvent part of the financial industry?

Georges Bock. – What convinced me was actually how little the underlying infrastructure of finance had changed. We have digital interfaces, but behind them we still find multiple intermediaries, databases, messages and reconciliations. We have digitised the front end without fundamentally redesigning the rails underneath. DLT changes that possibility.

Instead of institutions constantly communicating about an asset and reconciling their respective records, we can increasingly interact with a programmable asset on shared infrastructure. For me, that is where the opportunity lies: not simply making today’s processes faster, but questioning why they were designed that way in the first place. Tokenisation is not a product innovation, it is a switch to amore powerful infrastructure.

Can tokenization already transform investing, or are we still in an experimental phase?

Long story short: yes. Tokenisation is already real, but we are still very early in understanding its full impact. I compare it to the first mobile phones. The first innovation seemed obvious: you could make a phone call without a fixed line. Nobody initially imagined that the same infrastructure would eventually transform photography, payments, media, navigation and banking, replace for example Kodak and reengineer some of the biggest companies in the world.

Today, much of the discussion around tokenisation focuses on faster settlement and T+0. Those are important improvements, but I don’t believe they are the endgame. T+0 is just the phone call. The bigger transformation starts when assets, money, identity and rules can interact on the same programmable infrastructure.

Is Luxembourg bold enough to remain at the forefront of upcoming financial innovations?

Yes and no! Luxembourg has many of the ingredients: an international financial centre, deep fund expertise, sophisticated regulation and several important legislative steps around DLT. But leadership cannot be measured by legislation alone. The real test is whether innovative infrastructure can operate at scale and connect seamlessly with European markets.

We should be ambitious about removing unnecessary duplication between the traditional and digital worlds, a so called “simplification administrative”, while maintaining investor protection. The opportunity for Luxembourg is significant and so is the threat if we miss the train. That requires continued dialogue between policymakers, regulators and companies actually building and operating these systems and courageous and timely steps ahead.