About the Book
Digital disruption is rapidly transforming the financial sector, propelled by FinTech, BigTech, and non-bank institutions meeting public needs but challenging incumbents. Central banks must adapt to facilitate fair competition, protect customer rights, and integrate new technology. Initiatives in countries like India, Brazil, and Thailand have reshaped finance, enhancing accessibility. Future developments, including central bank digital currencies, may revolutionize financial infrastructures, enabling incumbents and new players to offer improved products and services.
Central Banking at the Frontier: Creating a Digital Financial Landscape: Architecting the New Digital Financial Landscape comprehensively explores these changes, providing insights into emerging issues, initiatives, and debates that will define the evolving financial landscape.
Relevant not only for central bankers but also for professionals in banks, FinTech, and academia, Central Banking at the Frontier: Creating a Digital Financial Landscape helps readers stay informed on the dynamic digital era and contribute to shaping technology-driven financial services for the benefit of society.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Part I. The emerging digital financial landscape
Chapter 1. The driving forces of the emerging digital financial landscape
Chapter 2. The emerging digital financial landscape
Chapter 3. Challenges in the emerging digital financial landscape
Chapter 4. Implications of the challenges on the central banks
Part II. Regulatory responses
Chapter 5. Walled gardens and shadow banking
Chapter 6. Monetary sovereignty and singleness of money
Chapter 7. Customers’ rights, AI ethics, cybersecurity, and financial exclusion
Part III. Promotion of open digital infrastructures in financial services
Chapter 8. Open digital infrastructures in financial services: Concepts and practices
Chapter 9. Open digital financial infrastructures in financial services: A technical overview
Chapter 10. Digital ID: The foundation for safe and secure digital financial services
Chapter 11. Digital payments: Real-time, 24/7, with lower costs
Chapter 12. Data sharing: Open banking, open finance, smart data
Chapter 13. Central bank digital currency: Concepts, wholesale, and cross-border CBDC
Chapter 14. Retail CBDC: Digital banknotes and a platform for innovation
Part IV. Central banks’ capabilities upgrade
Chapter 15. Resilience mindset, mode of operations, and digital transformation
Chapter 16. Innovation: Tools and governance
About the Author :
Thammarak Moenjak has a PhD in Economics from The University of Melbourne, Masters in Public Management from Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and a B.Sc. (Econ) from the London School of Economics, Thammarak currently serves as Chief Representative, Bank of Thailand London Representative Office and Senior Advisor to Digital Currency Unit at the Bank of Thailand. Thammarak's work experience includes financial institutions strategy, monetary policy strategy, reserves management, modelling and forecasting, and corporate strategy. He was also a Lee Kuan Yew Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School in 2013 and served at Bank of Thailand New York Representative Office in 2008-2009, during the height of the Global Financial Crisis.
Review :
The emergence of digital financial services and, in particular, Central Bank Digital Currencies has changed the way we think about the role of Central Banks. Thammarak’s insights drawn from around the globe makes this book an essential read for anyone interested in the topic.
Digital disruption is a complex, multi-faceted issue. Writing in a remarkably readable style, this book shows, compares, and illustrates the evolving developments and the paths on which central banks might choose to tackle current and future challenges from digital disruption. An essential read for central bankers, practitioners, academics, students, and market participants who want to understand and help shape the emerging digital financial landscape.
Many of us take for granted that the economy of the country we live in remains healthy and stable; in large part this is down to the role played by the Central Banks. But Central Banks are facing new challenges on multiple fronts. A new digital financial landscape is emerging fuelled by new technologies, BigTech and FinTech innovators and changing customer expectations. For the first time, Thammarak Moenjak has taken a Central Bank lens to these developments and provides an authoritative guide to the challenges, responses and future outlook. The author’s personal experience has positioned him well to study the nature of these developments from multiple perspectives, and his global outlook is well demonstrated by multiple examples which support his narrative.
Of undoubted huge benefit to Central Bank readers, this book will also help policy makers, financial services practitioners and academics understand the challenges faced by Central Banks and the role they will need to play in the evolution of the digital financial landscape.
This book is a superb guide to the implications for central banking of the emerging digital financial landscape which the author, quite rightly, sees as an exciting new frontier of central banking. The book goes beyond merely providing a list of the challenges that the central banks are facing. Importantly, it focuses in detail on how the central banks might respond to those challenges to ensure that risks posed to monetary and financial stability are mitigated while at the same time enabling consumers and businesses to benefit the most from the new technologies.
There is no better introduction to the frontiers of digital finance for policymakers, researchers, and market participants than Moenjak's masterful new treatment. Drawing on his immersive grounding in the subject as a central banker with deep first-hand experience, Moenjak covers the waterfront of crucial topics, including digital identity, novel payment systems and currencies, financial stability, banking disruption, and regulation.
A comprehensive analysis of the role of central banks in a rapidly evolving financial landscape driven by digitalisation of payments, financial services, regulation and even money itself. Whether you are a practitioner, regulator, or teacher of financial markets, this is an essential source of information on the most recent developments.
Digital identity is foundational to a safe, secure, privacy respecting and inclusive digital economy. It is however a complex and fragmented topic with many previous attempts to establish ecosystems and much work ongoing both in the private and public sectors. Thammarak’s survey of this work will be invaluable to central bankers as they seek to understand the role digital identity should play in financial services and the digital economy more broadly and consider the role that central banks should play in developing, promoting and regulating policies and frameworks in this area.
Thammarak has identified and described some of the most critical areas for central banking in the next decade. The rapid pace of development in digital payments, and central banks’ involvement in them through instant payment and settlement systems and – potentially – both wholesale and retail CBDCs will change the global payment landscape permanently. Increasingly central banks will have the means and opportunity to directly influence payment markets, and the way they use this influence will have profound implications for regulation, competition, resilience, financial stability and inclusion. Central Banking at the Frontier set out the challenges and identifies the tools that will be needed by central banks to meet them. As Thammarak makes clear, the future will be very different from the past.
As the book demonstrates, the task of the central banker has changed radically and rapidly with the digitisation of the financial system and new skills must therefore be acquired and new tools deployed. Thammarak develops his arguments in detail and at a practical level rather than simply setting out a general overview and thus provides readers with concrete guidance as to how to deal with these new challenges. His book should be required reading for all senior staff at the World’s Central Banks.
Central Banking at the Frontier: Creating a Digital Financial Landscape" provides a remarkably comprehensive and clear guide to the new technologies, players, and financial instruments reshaping the future of finance and money globally, considered from a central banking perspective - all from the unique vantage point of somebody who has been deeply involved for many years, with a commendable attention to detail and commitment to open inquiry. The book is timely and important given the pivotal role central banks are poised to play, and the weighty decisions they must undertake to navigate and shape this evolving frontier while upholding their core mandates of financial and monetary stability amidst the tumult of change. This authoritative work can be an invaluable guide for policymakers, regulators, industry practitioners and researchers alike, who are seeking to equip themselves to navigate with confidence and clarity this emerging landscape where complexities abound.
