Jacek Jastrzębski, Chair of the Polish Financial Supervision Authority, took part in ‘The Future of Finance’ discussion panel organised by the Atlantic Council and Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego as part of the Three Seas Hub during the World Economic Forum in Davos.

We invite you to watch the retransmission of the discussion. 

Key points of Jacek Jastrzębski’s address during the panel:

• As a financial supervisor, we see a number of new risks associated with technology development. However, it’s fair to say that ‘traditional risks’ are not gone. Technology development makes some of the traditional risks even more acute. This is why, while focusing on new risks, we can’t forget about the old ones.
• The cooperation between public institutions and the private sector is something I consider a valuable alternative to new regulations. Perhaps we’re at a stage where new regulations or stricter regulations won’t be very helpful and might only make us lose our competitive advantage. Therefore, I believe that an improved, more effective and more flexible cooperation between the public and private sectors is better than new regulations.
• Recent years have shown that there’s no real alternative to bank deposits covered by the state. We could also see it in the United States, where the state guarantee has actually been extended to include non-covered deposits. It’s also one of the reasons why traditional banking is doing fine and is not going to disappear. 
• I don’t think our ambition or goal is to become a centre for markets in crypto-assets or other related services. We’re trying to focus on promoting Blockchain applications other than crypto-currencies. There are a few examples of such applications in the Polish market, e.g. in the e-voting system on the stock exchange. Blockchain can be used as a tool to ensure a secure voting system. We’re open to exploring the capacities of this technology in cybersecurity and consumer protection, and the possibility of providing consumers with required product data. It’s something we would like to promote and support.
• We see potential benefits and opportunities of applying Blockchain in, for example, healthcare, public services, authorisation or authentication, and identity management. However, we should ask ourselves why – apart from the area of crypto-assets – Blockchain doesn’t grow as fast as we could expect. We still can’t see the significant, spectacular applications of this technology that we have expected. As a financial supervisor, we have programmes for supporting Blockchain. But for certain reasons – and ‘why’ is still an open question – we haven’t seen the spectacular applications of this technology that all of us probably expected a few years ago.