O Futuro dos Meios Eletrônicos de Pagamento | 19º CMEP

Scala Global
Global Banking Lead Center Michael
Abbott.
>> Welcome.
Sorry, that that's it. It's the end. I
tried.
I'm gonna disappoint you from here on
out with my Portuguese. So, um, thank
you everyone. Michael Abbott uh, mention
I leave the global banking practice,
Accenture. What I wanted to do today was
walk you through a little bit of what
we're seeing around the world. So, we're
going to do a uh, a big tour. We're
going to talk a bunch about payments,
but a lot of other things, too. So, with
that in mind, let me just jump right
into this. In this job, I've spent most
of my life probably more on the other
side of the table. um you know running
running banks and running networks and
that side of it. Helped build out Apple
Pay and helped and sold a company that
is now Google Pay. And one of the things
that's interesting in this role right
now is you get to see what everyone is
doing around the world and what they're
thinking about. So, what I'm going to
try to share with you today is a little
bit of a global perspective of what
we're seeing banks, networks, issuers,
acquirers around the world, what they're
doing right now and the challenges
they're facing and the strategies that
they're thinking about. So, there's a
number of different topics here. We're
going to talk a bunch about money. Um,
we're going to probably skip a little
bit about the experience side of it, but
the short version of that is you should,
every one of you that has in the banking
side should ask your chatbot one
question, which is what's the interest
rate on my account? And if it can't
answer it, if it does, if it answers it
just with a number and it doesn't answer
it with how can I help you, then you
got, you know what that's all about. The
future of experience should look more
like a branch manager. We're going to
talk about um Agentic and the future of
work, the high cost, the low cost in
technology. Skip a little bit of risk
and we're going to talk about the future
of competition because I know the future
of competition has been about fintex. I
don't think the future is fintex. I
don't think it's that. I think it's
something very very different given what
we're seeing out there. So with that in
mind, let me let me jump in section.
First thing here and I love this title,
dumb money gets smarter. So I think the
way we think about store and use money
is going to change radically out there.
And here's why.
First before we go forward, I want to
take a step back. If you go back to the
days of the Medadichi in Italy when
banking started, the movement of money
was simple. You took money from one bank
and you moved it to another. It was a
physical movement of gold, right? It
moved from one account to another. It
moved from Florence to to Milan. And by
the way, when that when we took that
concept and we brought it forward into
the into the era of bonds and equities,
we did the same thing. Many of you may
not have remember this, but we used to
issue bonds and we used to issue shares.
And when you traded a share, you had to
physically give it to somebody else.
Hence the T+2, T plus3 that we've all
inherited. It took time to physically
move these things. And then what did we
do when we started to digitize all of
this? We took all that history from the
1400s and we just digitized it. We moved
things from from bank A to bank B or
from account A to account B. Hence all
the settlement pieces that are out
there. Here's the thing about the future
of payments and the future of equities,
bonds, and everything else. And what's
about to change is that just imagine now
the money doesn't move. It sits in one
place. And now instead that money, we
all agree it sits here. It points to
customer A. And then when you move it,
it points to customer B. The money never
moves again. And at first I thought,
I'll be honest, at first I thought,
yeah, this is just science fiction, you
know, decentralized finance. It's just
buzzword bingo. Wasn't really going to
happen. I got to admit, I was wrong. I
was wrong. When you look at what's going
on with stable coins right now around
the world, they have become effectively
a global checking account. Now,
initially it started off with the crypto
world, right? If you were if you were
trading crypto and you wanted to move
your money out of crypto, you couldn't
move it to a bank because of the
regulations. So, what happened? People
created stable coins as the ability to
move money and store it there. But very
quickly these things like Circle and
Tether have turned into global telephone
networks of money. You can move it
everywhere around the world. To put that
in perspective, there is $300 billion
sitting on stable coins out there right
now. If you were to take stable coins
and you looked at them as a buyer of
treasuries, they are the number five
foreign buyer of US treasuries right
now. This thing is enormous and it's
moved way beyond buying and selling
crypto in the person-toperson payments.
Got a little money laundering going on
there at times too, you know, but it's
turned into a global network of money.
It's literally a global checking account
and it's everywhere in the world.
There's over a quarter of a billion
people have wallets out there that can
hold stable coins, right? And when you
roll this forward, and this is what I
find even more fascinating being here
today, when you look at it from a Latin
American perspective, I think it gets
even more interesting, right? When you
look at it globally, still crypto assets
dominate that's out there. Stable coins
only represent 30%. It is the opposite
in Latin America. Stable coins are
rapidly taking over. In fact, they're
growing almost 100% a year and represent
60% of the transaction volume that's
coming through that. So let's dive even
a little bit deeper and look at it
country by country right now. And I
found this fascinating when we put this
research together for this. You'll see
here, you'll see Brazil is actually
leading the way on this in terms of
volume. And you can see the numbers in
here. It's almost uh 60% now is sitting
out there in terms of money movement off
of stable coins. And you can see it
across for Argentina, Mexico, Colombia,
and Peru. But that's actually not the
interesting part. The interesting part
are these statistics, right? When you
look at it, about 14% of Latin American
payments now are coming in and out of
the countries via stable coins. But I
want to I want to draw your eyes to a
couple things here. One, the sheer size
of that number that's coming in and out
of Brazil. You're Brazil is leading the
way in this in terms of making stable
coins a accepted method of payment. But
I also for any of the central bankers in
the room today, I want to point you to
the circle around Argentina, right?
Because when you look at Argentina,
there is over 200% of the normal money
movement that's occurring in and out of
Argentina is occurring now in stable
coins outside of the banking system.
Right? This is outside of the banking
system. When I talked about this with
some people in Colombia a few weeks ago,
they were saying this is the number one
thing they're looking at in terms of how
they think about the movement of money
is how it's going to change radically.
And when you see this, look, right now,
um, Brazil accounts for almost 51%, half
of the crypto flows out there. It's
growing over 100% a year right now. And
that growth, when you dig underneath it,
we don't have enough time today to go
through all of it. It's not just
consumer. on what I showed you, there's
an increasing amount of commercial money
that's being moved through this out
there. You've seen a number of deals
that have been put out there. Um,
they're starting to become almost a
dominant transaction layer for
international payment movements and you
have the regulations moving in your
favor to open this all up. So, for all
of you in this room who are looking at
this right now, I would encourage you to
look at this heavily. And here's why.
All you have to do is take a look south
down to Argentina and what's happened.
And what you will see is you'll see if
you're a gig economy worker down there,
freelance worker, over half of the
freelance workers in Argentina now are
getting paid in US dollar stable coins.
It is rapidly becoming a method of
payment. And again, it is outside of the
financial system. It's outside of the
central bank. And it now represents
almost 17% of Argentina's reserves.
Again, for the central bankers, you're
not going to be able to inflate your way
out of these things anymore because
there's a different way of moving money
that's emerging out there. And I think
the question for all the for all the
traditional players, that includes me
where I've been, is how are you going to
integrate this in to the future? And
here's the last thing I will leave you
on stable coins, which is, and this
stunned me,
it's 99% US dollars. There has been
euros launched, other currencies,
everything out there. But for some
reason, obviously I'm from New York, for
some reason it's sitting out there in US
dollars. I think the real question for
everyone here, is what is going to be
the future innovation? What is going to
challenge that? Is it going to be
central bank digital currencies? Will it
be alternatives from Swift? Will you
find a non US dollar stable coin? I can
tell you we have a lot of interest
coming in around bullion banking and
goldbacked ones. I think this is a wide
openen space to figure out where this
goes. So I'd encourage all of you to
have this on your list of things to look
at. So I'm going to switch gears and
jump into how um money's going to even
get smarter and talk about agentic
payments and what's going on there. But
before I jump into Agentic, I think it's
important to kind of again take a step
back. We have lived in the last 25 years
in what I would describe as the
attention economy, right? And the
attention economy works this way.
We search, we look for things, we find
it, we go to the website, we make a
purchase. And you can see that it goes
all the way down. It goes, it goes all
the way down from awareness at the top
down to payment and checkout at the
bottom.
We're leaving that economy. We're
entering entering what I would call is
the intent economy. If I want to
purchase an iPhone, I can go out and you
I will be able to get an agent to say
make that purchase. But what happens,
all of that awareness, the whole way
that this system was built is about to
break. And we need to build a new system
to make it happen. We need to build a
new system that's going to allow to for
delegation of that authority for price
discovery, for feature payment. Think
about promotional financing, buy now,
pay later. All those things that occur
at the bottom of the funnel are going to
now have to occur inside of the agents
and be delegated to them. This is going
to require a complete rethink of that.
And by the way, what's even more
fascinating is the internet itself is
breaking. Right? The equation of the
internet in the attention economy was I
will let you search my website and scan
through it with bots so that you can put
up the information in a search engine.
Why? So I can send the eyeball back to
you. What happens when we're no longer
sending eyeballs back to the retailers
going forward? Now all of a sudden we're
just delegating and saying I want you to
make this happen. Well, what's happening
is there's a cold war going on right
now. Cloudfare has blocked many of the
websites, the GPT engines from being
able to search the websites. On top of
that, Amazon has famously now gone out
and also blocked the GPT engines from
searching all the websites. Why? Because
they don't know how the payment is going
to be made. So what's needs to be
figured out here on Agentic is who's
going to control that new economy? How
are payments going to flow in this
model? Is it going to be through
protocols? Will it be pay per crawl? How
do you deal with micro payments going
back and forth? Instead of the user
paying, the agent has to pay. All of
this needs to be figured out, right? So
it's going to require us to rethink
payments across the board. If you look
at a traditional payment network, which
I've spent my life in, buyer all the way
to seller, right? The first thing that's
going to have to change is the nature of
the buyer is going to change. The buyer
is going to become an agent plus an
orchestrator agent plus a payment agent
are going to start to emerge inside of
there. And then the question for the
payments people in the room is how do
you support that? Well, everything's
going to need to be rethought. You're
going to need to rethink what does it
mean to be an issuer in that environment
where you issue now to an agent. What
does it mean to be an acquirer where the
agent is now making the purchase? How do
you verify that you're actually
legitimate site on the other side of it?
The risk and underwriting that we've
always done. It is going to require a
complete rethink of the network and I'll
get to that in a few minutes. It's going
to require protocols to be brought
forward on that. And most importantly,
it's going to take all of the payment
methods that were traditionally at the
end of the funnel at the seller site and
it's going to ask you and it's going to
force you to bring all those forward
into the payment flow going forward. So
when you look at this point number one
protocols, it's quite fascinating. When
HTTP, you know, the internet, the the
worldwide web protocols were first
published back in 1991,
there was a there was a there was a
protocol published for payments 402. it
is not used. The original idea of the
internet was to actually have payments
go back and forth for the websites, but
we moved to this attention economy where
we got everything for free. So actually
the protocol is out there underlying to
make this happen. And what you have
right now is you have a battle for
protocols going on, right? You've got
universal commerce, you got agent
protocol, you've got the networks
building their own protocols. The
question will be is which one of these
is going to win in which way does it
play out right and then what that has an
implication for is it has an implication
to the way you think about networks
right so um you know if you think about
and all the networks you've built pix
whatever they may be those networks have
to be rethought and this is a
fascinating point when you look at the
history of payment networks out there
what has happened over time they have
gotten faster and cheaper all the way
down as we've evolved through it right
all the way down into now you have the
tokenization side which can be very
cheap in the 10 basis point range on
that front and the question I think for
all of you and for those of you in the
room that are in the network side is
what will be the agentic payment network
out there will the protocol will those
protocols in the prior page ultimately
become the network and you'll be able to
move money any way you time right will a
new network will emerge that follows
this trend to its logical conclusion
which is instant invisible and free to
move aentic money around and then the
big question will also be is how will
micro payments be solved by the way just
to give you an idea of what some people
are thinking about imagine now with
tokenization that you hold the deposits
you can actually invent believe it or
not a negative interchange network that
can solve this problem because if you
can hold the deposit, you can earn
interest on that. So you could all of a
sudden see this chart go completely this
way and still be incredibly profitable.
So just some food for thought as you
think about where Aentic is going and
the implications specifically to
payments as we go forward. So I'm going
to switch gears here a little bit and
talk about the battle for the balance
sheet. Um, as I mentioned before, yeah,
I don't think the future is about
fintex. But when you look at the past,
what you do see is you do see the
fintech ecosystem has been incredibly
robust, right? And when you look at
those, you can see the dark green ones
that are on this page. They are all
payments fintexs. When you look around
the world, almost every major billion
dollar plus company that's emerged
attacked the payment system in one way
or another. And there was a reason for
that because when you looked at the
profit pools that are in banking
globally, what you find is you find the
profit pools are incredibly rich on the
payment and network side. In fact, in
many ways, the return on equity in those
sides of the businesses are off the
charts in terms of historical banking
profitability. So what you've had over
the last 20 years, I would argue, is
you've had fintexs that have emerged
that have attacked banking and the
payment system from inside of the
banking system, right? And so let's look
at that as you go forward. But when you
look at where the real money is, it was
on the top of that chart. The real money
to attack in banking is not the payment.
That's where the profitability is. The
real money is in the balance sheet. And
this is what the new players emerging
are starting to realize that the money
is not in what the traditional players
have done which is on the bottom of this
chart which is the fintex that have gone
after all this fee driven income from
the bottom up and effectively attacked
banking from with inside of banking and
became regulated entities. Instead, what
we're seeing emerge is you're seeing
people attack the balance sheet to go
after the real scale and scope out there
outside of banking. So, you've seen this
already. Um, you've seen it on one time,
you see it in the competition for loans
in the banking world. So, you see it in
the form of private credit, assetbacked
finance. Um, to put this in perspective,
there's a company called Figure in the
US. They packaged up home mortgages.
actually helocks for anybody's really
interested. And they packaged them up.
And normally you would sell them out.
You'd have to be a bank to sell them.
No. What did they do? They packaged them
up. They tokenized them, put them out in
the blockchain. A billion dollars and
just had people pick them up. They had
institutional buyers buy them. So now
you have a billion dollars of mortgages
sitting out here outside the banking
system trading 247. Complete
transparency.
that doesn't even exist in the banking
world, right? It's a great example of
attacking that. And then fintexs are
obviously doing that, too. On the other
side, on the deposit side, what you're
seeing is exactly what we talked about.
You can look at stable coins as a form
of payment as we did before. But what's
the real magic of stable coins? They are
really deposits. One of the biggest
worries right now in the banking system
in the US is that stable coins will pull
deposits out of the system into what are
called narrow banks. Banks are
effectively companies that look like
banks but don't actually lend, right?
And again, you know, $300 billion dollar
has already been pulled out and put into
stable coins. And you have a whole host
of other things fintech trying to emerge
on the checking side. But by the way, if
I were to tell you, I don't think any of
this matters. What's on this page?
Because I think this is the question
that we see everyone asking in the
boardroom, which is what do I do when
all of a sudden customers can come in
and they can just simply ask a GPT
engine to optimize my idle cash, my
money, and move it around. Now, this has
always been a dream of the FinTechs out
there, but it's been incredibly hard.
But now that you have open banking, you
have GPT engines, the ability to develop
this very quickly, I can tell you this
is not that far away. And we're seeing
it already start to emerge in Europe
because of the open banking capabilities
out there. So, who would not want to be
the one to help customers optimize the
value of their accounts, whether it be
on the depository side or on the lending
side. So, what does this look like? So,
we're moving a little bit beyond
payments in the competition side for the
balance sheet. Here's what it could look
like. Here's what it could look like for
for different countries in Latin
America. Um, if AI agents can come at
that, if you can do that simple optimize
my money, whether it be lending or
whether it be depository side of it and
you can just get 10% out of the net
interest margin on that front, you can
see the pre-tax profit decline. So, what
we're seeing right now is we're seeing
major banks look at this question and
they're saying, should I go and do this
myself? Should it be in my app? Should I
go out and say I'll help you optimize
your money
on one side of it. The other side of it
is they're starting to think about
product innovations that tie together
both the asset liability and you can
think of it as alco for any of the
bankers out there. Asset plus liability
at the customer level and how can I
build product sets that can basically be
immune to this type of change. If I were
to tell you one thing, this is probably
the biggest opportunity and the biggest
risk for the banking system out there.
So, I'm going to switch gears one more
another time here and talk about um
agentic capacity and what we're seeing
there because I think this is beyond
fascinating. Um and I love this quote
from JP Morgan, right? So, if you're out
there and you're working on a Gentic,
you're going to hear all kinds of
things. I'm not going to bore you with a
Gentic. You heard that to death. I think
this is what matters. What would you do
if I gave you 10,000 more people at a
marginal cost of zero tomorrow? How
would you rethink the business that
you're in? How would you rethink what
you're doing? That's the question I
think all of us need to ask. Right? And
when you look at this um what is
fascinating is we see banks globally
taking two different paths when it comes
to Aentic. Path A I would say is the use
case path. What use case can I lay out?
Can I have a presentation I can give to
my board and can I say out here's all
the use cases you can do. The other path
which is the path that JP Morgan took is
fascinating because you can you can read
it on this page but their belief was
actually something simpler. They said,
"You know what? This is 1980
and Excel has just been released and
we're not going to be able to do banking
without it. So therefore, we need to
enable all 250,000
people in our organization with this
capability to leapfrog everybody else
that is out there." And look, you don't
have to be JP Morgan to do that. I think
any one of you in this room can do that.
But it is a philosophical question on
Agentic. Do you believe this is just
another piece of technology that's going
to drive some use cases or do you
fundamentally believe it's going to
rewire everything that you do out there?
And people always ask me, you know, who
do you think what do you think is going
to separate the winners and losers on
the agentic side? Actually, I think it
has absolutely nothing to do with
technology itself. From what I've seen,
I think it has everything to do with
culture. And what we're seeing is
absolutely fascinating. We're seeing
that the banks that have a sense of the
banks are players that have a sense of
curiosity tempered with execution,
right? Are the ones that are winning.
But what does it mean to execute? What
it means is it means you do not confuse
collaboration
with consensus. And hopefully these
translate well. Collaboration means I
want to get everyone's input on it.
Consensus means I need everyone to
agree. When it comes to this, you cannot
have everyone agree, right? You have to
make decisions to move and execute on
these things. And when you do, the
results are unbelievable on that front.
Um, so I'm going to switch gears one
more time here and talk about kind of
how this is changing the way people are
working. And I want to give you an
example of software development, right?
Because this was fascinating. We're
gonna we're going to put this on stage
publicly next week um with our friends
at MIT that we did the research with. Um
and what's interesting is everyone's
talked about AI delivery, you know, with
with um with uh with, you know, with
co-pilots and Claude and the others out
there. And what you see is you see phase
one, most people do assisted delivery.
They do co they they use it and they
help they have the AI engine help the
person. Then what you see is you see a
move to what we call AI delegated
delivery and that means they build
agents to go do testing and things like
that. And by the way those things are
good. They can get you 10 20 30 40
sometimes 50% productivity. But what we
found was we found that when you try to
scale that across large enterprises
believe it or not the time frames don't
go down they actually go up. They
actually go up. And so we asked the
question, how do you rethink software
development in the age of AI? And in
many ways, I think what's going to
happen is I think agile is dead. And I
think what you're looking at is what
happened in waterfall and bringing many
of those techniques forward. We call it
adaptive development. But the idea is to
take all those personas that you had
before and be able to move them into
blueprint oriented approaches or what
are called ontologies. that those
ontologies then can become systems that
then can be modified and maintained
going forward. So this isn't about vibe
coding. And the reason why I give you
this example is a detailed one for any
of the programmers out there is because
you have to rethink every single thing
that you thought was true for the last
several years when you can have 10,000
people working for you, right? And
here's another great example of it um
which is how do you move from serial
thinking to parallel thinking. So all of
us myself included I'm a master black
belt g trained hardened hard hardened on
how to do six sigma to the nth degree
have been trained in serializing things
in processoriented engineering. Remember
re-engineering all that stuff process
engineering. Why? Because we had a
scarce number of people. Well, in a
world where you can have an infinite
number of people, why think about things
in process? Take mortgages as an
example. Instead of running a mortgage
through a through a chain like this and
waiting for it to go through every
process, why not string that chain out
like this all across the board and do
everything in peril the minute the data
comes in, have every single person in
the process look at it because they're
free, right? You could do this. So all
of a sudden you need to move from this
idea of serialized approaches that we've
built our entire world over in banking
to paralyzing those concepts. So look if
you remember just one thing from
everything I just went through here on
all this I'd say just remember this 10x
you have 10 times the capacity that you
believe going forward and that is the
key to the future of payments and where
I believe all this is going. It is a
world that is going to be unconstrained
in our thinking and our capability. And
it's only going to be limited by how
much you're willing to break the
thinking that has brought us to where we
are now and rethink it in the age of
Agentic, in the age of digitized stable
coins, digital assets, and everything
else that's out there. So, um, with that
in mind, thank you very much. I know I'm
sitting between you and lunch, so I
thought I'd end a little bit early. And
Abraato
Thank you so much. Was a pleasure having
you here.
>> Thank you.