Fireside Chat
Fireside Chat at the Investment Magazine 2026 Chair Forum
Brad Jones
Assistant Governor (Financial System)
Investment Magazine 2026 Chair Forum
4 February 2026
–
Sorrento
Audio
42.9MB
Watch video: Fireside Chat with Brad Jones, Assistant Governor (Financial System), Investment Magazine 2026 Chair Forum, Sorrento
Transcript
Speaker
Reserve Bank of Australia Dr Brad Jones, Assistant Governor of the financial system, he’s not
going to talk about interest rates. Please don’t ask him any dopey questions. That was all put
out yesterday. He doesn’t look after that part of the bank per se. He does look after your part,
however, and it’s my pleasure to introduce Dr David Bell who will host Dr Brad Jones. Please
welcome them.
David Bell
Brad, welcome, and welcome back. Thanks for being here and thanks for sharing the RBA’s
perspective and monitoring of the superannuation system and that connection between the monetary
system, liquidity and the big capital that’s in the room.
Twelve months ago you set out a framework where you were thinking about two different groups of
risks. One was the business cycle risks which you didn’t really go into, but then we went into a
second set of structural risks which included geopolitical, operational risk and climate risk. So
today, 12 months on, let’s start with that international scene set, and I’m guessing
it’s the structural issues that are keeping you awake at night.
Brad Jones
Yes, thanks, David. It’s not that we don’t worry about the business cycle, obviously we do,
it’s just that all central banks have got plenty of experience in navigating those sorts of
issues. I think internationally the three slow burning issues that are occupying our attention would
be No. 1, geopolitical disorder; No. 2, the increase in sovereign debt internationally; and No.
3 would be the imbalances in China. So maybe if I start at the bottom there.
On China, it’s not so much that we worry, that I worry, about a classic emerging market style
sudden stop. Historically emerging markets that have had very big credit booms, that’s been the
thing that’s brought them undone, not to worry about that so much in China just because of the
nature of who owns the debt, i.e. it’s largely domestically owned. So the authorities there have
quite a lot of control over the pace of deleveraging and also how the pain is distributed across the
system. The larger question with China is the appetite of the rest of the world to absorb
China’s industrial surplus. That one’s a big open question.
On sovereign debt, over the years it’s become increasingly difficult to see how anything other
than a crisis in the bond market in large, advanced economies is going to prompt the authorities to
change course. Now, there’s no obvious way of being able to predict a debt sustainability
crisis. The way the math works is it’s not a problem until it’s a problem. It’s a
problem when the interest rate exceeds the trend rate of growth on the economy, and that could
– maybe that never happens or maybe it happens tomorrow. It’s inherently unstable. The
things that worry us there, though, is just that most large, advanced economies now do not have a
medium-term fiscal framework, and we’re observing war time-like deficits being run in a period
of economic strength. Most G7 countries have a debt to GDP ratio in excess of 100% which
historically you would only ever see after war. At the same time that the supply of debt is rising,
the demand from price insensitive buyers of government bonds is diminishing at the margins. So
there’s a few things coming together there that’s a bit worrying.
Finally on geopolitics, and just to be clear, this is not an issue that we’ve just started to
think about in the last six or 12 months. We’ve had a program of work underway around this
with my colleagues on the Council of Financial Regulators for a number of years, and what that
reflects is a recognition that there are very big structural pressures that are building inside the
international system that relate to changes in the distribution of power and that relate to big
questions over the perceived legitimacy of that system.
When you look back across the sweep of history we’ve had four attempts in about four centuries at
trying to construct some semblance of order. In the mid-17th Century, the Treaty of Westphalia, after
the Napoleonic Wars, again after World War I and then after World War II with the Bretton Woods and
San Francisco Accords. Out of those four attempts two have lasted a long time and provided a terrific
foundation for peace and economic stability, two did not. There’s clearly big pressures on the
current system. We are starting to observe some signs of fragmentation in the global economy and in
the international financial system in response to these pressures.
Some of the changes are just organic, they just reflect that different parts of the world are growing
at different rates and so you would expect some changes in the international financial system to
occur organically. But others do look a bit less benign, and the areas that we’re sort of
monitoring here is the way that sanctions are being used, the way that capital flows are starting to
change, changes in reserve currency holdings, changes in the international payments system, and
potential changes in the global financial stability net. So they’re the dimensions of this theme
of international fragmentation that are on our radar and attracting certainly plenty of my attention.
David Bell
Brad, the words you used last year were – I loved reading the session notes from last year, the
transcript – ‘You know, there’s a reversion to a more contested world, a type of
world that in fact prevailed for many centuries and this has come after eight years of peace’,
and you’ve just now reiterated that in sort of four pressure points, I guess. Can I just jump
back to the China piece for a minute where the imbalances are and the outcome of those imbalances,
and you said you’re not necessarily concerned about an economic event in China, a crisis event
that impacts external investors because most of the debt is provided internally but the absorption of
that industrial surplus, yet to a degree much of the world needs that, to absorb that industrial
surplus to contain its own inflation rate. So there’s sort of a – there’s a balance
there that you need to continue as well, isn’t there?
Brad Jones
Yes, look, there’s tensions and contradictions wrapped all through that mix, but at the same
time you do have to give policymakers some credence for having managed to sustain rates of growth
that we just haven’t observed in a large economy for long periods of time. So it’s a very
complex system. As I said, just using your standard emerging market analytical framework and imposing
that in thinking how these tensions get resolved in China I don’t think is very helpful.
One aspect that we haven’t mentioned that sort of ties the industrial surplus piece with the debt
piece is deflation. One thing that we do know from – one lesson from history is a heavily
indebted economy that is grappling with deflation, that’s a real challenge, and I know
that’s very much in the foremost of a lot of people’s thinking about how this excess
industrial surplus is being exported. Partly what that reflects is there’s not enough domestic
demand and you’re seeing sort of not much inflationary pressure in China, and then there’s
a question, well, does that then reinforce this debt sustainability issue in China. So, as I said, I
suspect it’s going to be a slow burn, but the final chapter has not been written on that one.
David Bell
Yes. Moving to super funds and the financial system, so this time last year really it was – I
wouldn’t say an introduction of the RBA to the super industry, but it was sort of one of the
first times the RBA stepped on to a platform in front of the superannuation industry and as an
announcement that we’re engaging with you more, and I take it through the last 12 months
since we’ve been here that that engagement has stepped up more and that you are sort of directly
engaging with major industry participants. Your comments on superannuation, I see they’re always
heavily scrutinised by media, which you sort of can really get quite narrow in its framing. How would
you frame the super fund sector’s contribution to financial stability in Australia?
Brad Jones
The short answer is it’s been positive up until now. That’s the short answer. That said,
there’s some big challenges ahead and things are going to keep evolving, but I think you have to
acknowledge the starting point. The starting point is that this is a national asset, this pool of
capital, it is the envy of many countries in the world, and there are important structural features
in the industry which distinguish it from many of its counterparts internationally which has, I
think, been helpful from a financial stability perspective. Constraints on leverage, the absence of
guaranteed returns, the fact that the liabilities are not really runnable, the long-term horizons,
all of those things distinguish some other systems internationally. Empirically when we look back at
case studies, deep dives, around 2008, how did the industry behave in 2008 and how did the industry
behave in 2020, the two big shocks in the last 20 years.
What we found in 2008 was that the super system was a larger than usual net purchaser of Australian
equities right at the time when our banking system, for instance, and the financial markets were
experiencing most stress. And then in 2020 what we observed was super funds selling offshore
equities, bringing some of that capital home, putting some of it to work in domestic equities. We
haven’t seen margin calls in foreign exchange market, FX derivative margin calls would be
particularly destabilising. So that’s the good news, and there’s a but, and the but relates
to that’s been the story up till now and we shouldn’t extrapolate and some things are going
to change in the future. It certainly also helps when you’ve got net inflows of one and a-half
to two billion a week. That certainly helps from a financial stability perspective, and that’s
one of the things that are going to change going forward.
David Bell
I guess that’s what was part of the shock of 2020, that those contributions slowed and some
money was allowed to be taken out of the system at short notice. So there was a shock to the
underpinnings there.
Brad Jones
Yes, well – yes. I think what really helped there was that JobKeeper turned out to be a very
important policy initiative in that the withdrawals from the system turned out to be a lot less than
what would have otherwise been the case.
David Bell
Yes. So I think, yes, the points you’re making, Brad, there, that the system has performed that
counterbalancing role, a really valuable role in a time of crisis, particularly around the GFC, and
that’s been quite celebrated by the industry, but I think there’s a warning there that
– you’re effectively making a warning that that provision in the future is far from
guaranteed. We find similar stuff ourselves in the paper we released last year,
Systemic
Impacts of Big Super
. So there’s a lot of alignment there.
One of the key pieces that came out during the discussion last year was the piece about some of the
structural changes, and one of them particularly interesting, and wouldn’t mind an update on it,
and that is super fund holdings of short-term bank debt, and you pointed out that the number has gone
from 5% up to 35%. Is that something in the intervening period, the last 12 months, you’ve
been engaging with the funds on more or the banks or just trying to work out what could an orderly
unwind look like there in a difficult situation?
Brad Jones
Yes, that’s an example of this sort of broad thematic about things are changing and so we
shouldn’t just blindly extrapolate the past into the future. When we think about liquidity risk
more generally, so what are the things that are going to change? No. 1, the ownership share of
various asset classes in Australia will almost certainly continue to rise. No. 2, there’s a
question around could pro-cyclicality in the industry be amplified through some combination of the
growing role of external advisers, and we’ve heard a lot about that today, could it be the way
that benchmarks are constructed, could it be more members switching, as more members get closer to
retirement large balances become more sensitive to market sell. There’s a few things there to
unpack that could be different.
The share of assets in retirement phase is going to grow. So the system becomes less of a closed loop
than historically. Margin calls from the growing FX hedge book are almost certainly going to grow,
and really the wild card here is do we have another early release scheme that the industry is not
ready for? None of us know what the next systemic crisis is going to look like, but that seal has
been broken once. So it behoves us to at least think about the possibility that that is another
– that lever is pulled again in the future.
All of that said, the work that we’ve done and our engagement with APRA and the industry
suggests, industry has uplifted, no question, since COVID. That progress, though, has been a bit
uneven is the general sense. So some funds have now got liquidity risk management practices that are
very, very strong, but it’s absolutely not the case right across the industry. So there’s a
question of maturation and deepening across the industry on liquidity risk. But if I could just add,
that’s not the only thing that we think is going to change. I should call out the FX piece.
It’s partly related.
We don’t see there being systemic issues today, but again, there are some changes, some
slow-moving changes that we can see coming down the pike. The fact that half of the industry’s
assets are held offshore, that’s going to grow and so the hedging demands off the back of that
will grow. Demographics alone will suggest that there’ll probably be more of a tilt toward fixed
income, and we know the hedge ratios in fixed income are about three times higher than they are in
equities. Margining and collateral requirements from counterparties are also almost certain to
increase because a lot of large funds at the moment don’t have to post margin or are on very
favourable terms from their counterparties. As you start hitting your limits, credit limits with your
counterparties and have to include more counterparties, including non-domestic banks, it would be
prudent to anticipate they will not provide such generous terms as the industry has enjoyed up until
this point. And then there’s just a question about the correlations between currencies and
different asset classes, could that structurally change and what does that mean for hedging. So
there’s a bunch of things in there that could also be quite different from the last 20 or
30 years.
David Bell
In one of the slides I brought up previously just projected the industry forward 10 years using
a compound growth rate of 8%, which is less than what’s been experienced recently, and that puts
you in a system that is 120% larger than it is today. So all those issues are magnified that
you’ve just listed through. If I just wrote them all out, obviously the ownership share, which
is going to force you offshore, and that’s going to really exacerbate the FX ownership
footprint, isn’t it. It’s probably the one that multiple outlets are pushing you towards.
How do you sort of help funds solve for that issue? Do they need more counterparty exposure? Is there
a way of getting a group of funds to work together to create a broader marketplace for FX? Or how
does that expand with the demand?
Brad Jones
This is a super deep market, super deep market, and the swap market where a lot of this hedging
activity goes on is deeper than the spot market. So although the super fund industry is going to
grow, so will other asset classes, so will the hedging needs of big corporates and so on. So this is
a market that has a huge amount of churn and there’s flows coming in from all directions and
there’s hedgers and there’s speculators so it’s a pretty deep and diverse ecosystem.
But what it does, I think, suggest is along with the liquidity risk issue more generally, I think it
does behove industry to think about the types of assumptions that are underpinning the management of
these risks.
So assuming, for instance – and this came out in APRA’s recent system-wide stress test
– what APRA was able to uncover from the system-wide stress test, which included the four
largest banks and the six largest super funds, was the presumption from the super funds that in the
event of a big liquidity shock you would all sell international equities and bring that money home.
Now, I think those exercises are useful in surfacing if every fund is thinking they’ll be able
to act exactly the same way then there may be some fallacy of composition risk that we’ve got.
So when you’re coming up with and interrogating as boards liquidity risk management plans, just
pausing and asking the teams that are providing their plans to you, do you think other super funds
would be acting in the same way you’re proposing here? And if the answer is yes, then maybe
it’s worth another look.
David Bell
It’s a great message to industry there. I’m just going to switch channel, Brad. I want to
get to some discussion around innovation in the financial system, also talk a little bit about views
on central bank independence and then we will have some good time for audience questions. Just before
I jump into the innovation piece, did you want to make any more comments on the geopolitics or the
Australian system and the systemic risks there?
Brad Jones
Maybe the last thing I’ll just say there is the way that we’ve come to view these risks,
and they are vast and they cut across the system and lots of parts of the economy in complex ways,
maybe just to encourage people to think about these risks in a couple of dimensions. One is the
traditional sort of market credit liquidity risks. But when you’re talking about geopolitics it
brings into the frame a set of risks that typically in the financial system at least haven’t had
to think too deeply about, things like insider risk, operational risk, how would your fund operate in
a different sanctioning regime, threats to your critical infrastructure. There are different sorts of
risks that emerge that are beyond just the standard market liquidity credit, and so our advice would
be split them apart and think deeply about both of those.
David Bell
Yes, those last ones are particularly interesting. At last year’s ASIC conference the head of
ASIO was the opening speaker and the comments and the fear you could see in the comments being made
about the potential for future attacks on Australian financial infrastructure, across all
infrastructure, but then the specific example of financial infrastructure just go very much to your
point and the need to have scenario planning in place, which is probably the technique for thinking
about those things at least.
Brad Jones
If I could just add, the last thing I really should have mentioned there, and Margaret touched on it,
is this interaction between operational risk and liquidity risk in the super sector, and the events
in April last year were a shot across the bow, and I actually, when I meet my colleagues
internationally, talk about that episode which we as a regulatory community think of as basically a
shot across the bow. So where you could have a number of risks metastasising at the same time, a big
market event, liquidity shock that is compounded by nefarious actors launching a wave of cyber
attacks specifically to undermine confidence in our financial system. So being alert to that, I
think, should give an extra push on the work that our colleagues at APRA are doing around operational
risk. It’s no longer a neat bucket, but how might operational risks compound liquidity stress in
the system.
David Bell
Thanks, Brad. Moving on to innovation in the financial system, and really the bank’s work on
central bank digital currency. Last year we had a little bit of an overview on Project Acacia and the
potential for tokenised financial markets. Recently Conexus ran a roundtable where there was
expressed excitement about the potential for tokenisation and digitisation and how that can make
private markets more accessible in smaller bite sizes and just more usable so it opens up portfolio
flexibility. Brad, could you please provide an update on where we’re going and what progress is
being made and what your learnings are as the RBA?
Brad Jones
I mean, the key policy question we’re asking ourselves that underlies all this work is how can
our financial system be more efficient, be more functional and are more resilient, particularly our
wholesale markets. That’s where we’ve observed maybe the most amount of inertia. For
instance, the way that our banks fund themselves in term deposits, that process basically hasn’t
changed in 25 years.
The secondary question is: what is the right mix of public and private innovation to bring out those efficiencies that improve
performance? Do we need a CBDC or are there other adjustments that we can make to our financial
market infrastructure short of that?
The tokenisation piece is a big area of focus for us. Cross border is another. They’re probably
the two areas where we see the biggest scope for potential gains. On the tokenisation of markets,
financial markets, there’s a case there for green field markets, carbon credits and others that
we have in Project Acacia, but also for established markets. The potential benefits that we’re
looking at there are
24/7
trading, being able to collapse counterparty
and settlement risk, reducing collateral costs because you’re not tying up collateral for two or
three days waiting for settlement to occur, removing a lot of manual intermediaries, and
programmability, being able to program conditional trades, for instance. These are all the potential
benefits and we’re seeing things take off in the US now, tokenised money market funds and recon
and so on.
All of that said, there are some challenges here. Interoperability of ledgers on and off chain,
fragmentation of liquidity, pre-funding trades. There are some issues to unpack there. We’ll
have more to say in a couple of months, but I would say that on the monetary side, the two-tier
system that we’ve had for a long time where the central bank concentrates on a few public goods
– trust in money, finality of settlement across our balance sheet, banks, level playing field
for competition – and then the private sector doing all the innovation on top and all the
client facing, we think that there’s very good merits for that sort of construct continuing in
the future no matter what function or form future money takes.
David Bell
Thank you. I just want to move now on to central bank independence, but after that I’ll go
straight to audience questions, so there’s a chance to start thinking about what you’d like
to ask Brad. It’s wonderful that we have him here on stage.
So we came up with these notes of where we’d like to go, central bank independence, and in
between writing those notes we’ve had a new appointment in the US, Kevin Warsh, which is
fascinating. We also had a letter which Michele Bullock signed showing full solidarity with the
concept of central bank independence. So there’s a number of dynamics at play here and I’d
really be interested in your thoughts and what you’d like to say on the topic.
Brad Jones
We recognise that sometimes we have to make decisions that are not popular with segments of the
community. The historical record is pretty clear about the consequences of an alternative model.
We’ve tried that. One of the great things about living in a democracy is that people are free to
express their views, including on topics like interest rates, and all central banks recognise that
with operational independence comes very important public accountability obligations. We take those
extremely seriously and it’s absolutely right that the central bank should have to explain and
be accountable to the public for its decisions.
There’s a couple of elements to that. One is our accountability to the Parliament. We’ll be
at the House of Reps on Friday in the latest iteration of that method of important accountability.
But also our accountability directly to the Australian public, and I hope that with the introduction
of press conferences after policy announcements that that’s helping on the accountability and
transparency journey as well because, as I said, we take it incredibly seriously.
David Bell
So that independence has to go hand in hand with those two forms of accountability that you framed
up. Colin wouldn’t let me on stage again if I didn’t try and prompt you a bit on the Kevin
Warsh appointment.
Brad Jones
I wish him all the best.
David Bell
I tried, Colin. Okay, I’ll hand over now to questions from the floor. Can we have a couple of
microphones ready, please?
Questioner
For the great presentation. Recently we took our board at Care Super – we’re based around
the country, but we took some of our directors down the road from my house to UNSW and took a quick
tour around the quantum computers that they’re building from the ground up. We heard from
Michelle Simmons about her timeframe for construction. In short, once she finds land close to the
university she’s up and building and ready to go. So the kind of standard quantum timeframe of,
you know, it’s 10 years, 10 years, 10 years is obviously now significantly
reduced from that. We’ve got a quantum strategy, but, you know, much of it says we’re not
sure what we’ll do when a quantum computer just breaks through all possible cyber security
measures that we have. Super interested to think what the RBA is thinking about this, especially
given in Australia we’re so good at quantum and so close to developing these kind of
technologies just down the road from most of our offices.
Brad Jones
Yes, great question. So this is an area that we are focused on and I made some public remarks about
this a couple of times last year. We are acutely aware that we’re moving into a phase – in
fact we’re right in right now – of harvest now, decrypt later. That’s the strategy
for nefarious actors. So we think it’s critically important that the financial system move on to
the advanced encryption standards as a matter of priority. We’re doing a lot of work with other
agencies on that and follow the counsel from the Australian Government about the sorts of timeframes
that are involved. It is going to almost certainly unleash some terrific innovation and it’s
also going to open up some big tail risks, and it’s impossible to know precisely when that nut
will have been cracked. The latest advice that we have is that industry should be prepared from 2030
onwards.
Questioner
You mentioned sovereign indebtedness at a global level. Just wondering what the RBA’s view is
domestically. I think analysis just came out to show that our budget deficits won’t be reduced
over the next 10-year period. This state has the lowest credit rating in Australia, and we
potentially – while our debt to GDP on global basis isn’t as heavy as a lot of western
economies – arguably we may not have the ability, the amount of outflows by government in
spending to repair the deficit. So how does the RBA view the Australian situation on sovereign
indebtedness and does it go to the state level or does it just focus at the federal?
Brad Jones
For reasons I’m sure you can imagine I’m not going to pass commentary on our deficits. Your
opening observation, though, is right. We are fortunate in Australia that we have low levels of
government debt by the standards of our international peers. It’s really up to our elected
officials and the Australian public as to what the right level is. That’s not something that I
think I should be drawn into. Thanks for the question, though.
David Bell
I think you’ve done well. I can see a question at the back right.
Questioner
I just want to explore a bit more about how we might be thinking of the White House’s
independence from the US Federal Reserve and what might be the implications more globally. In
particular, do you see that there’s a risk that the US may change its position on cooperating
with the global payments system through the International Bank, through BIS, or through the World
Bank, and related to that issue, we do note that the Reserve Bank’s at record levels in terms of
its reserve assets. Are you investing more or less into the US at the current moment?
Brad Jones
On the first question about is the US looking to engage with other institutions, other international
institutions, in a different way, I don’t have a lot to add there. I think every new
administration comes in and looks at the long list of international institutions that the US engages
with and supports and thinks about doing things differently, and I think that’s obviously
happening now.
The second question was are we investing our reserves in a different way. If you look at the asset
classes we invest in and so on, those reserves are managed very tightly relative to benchmarks and
those benchmarks have not changed much over the years. There will always be some natural deviation
every now and again. The Bank’s got a very small reserve portfolio compared to a number of our
peers like Japan or Switzerland. So, actually, if you’re thinking about capital flows, the
significance of capital flows from Australia outbound, it’s the people in this room here that
are going to perhaps have more influence than our reserve portfolio.
Questioner
Thanks, Brad. It’s been a great discussion. My key role and why I’m here, I guess, is I
chair the Advisory Board of the Conexus Institute. Now, forgive me if I asked this question of you
last year, but what’s the appetite for the RBA to provide emergency liquidity to super funds
like it does with banks by discounting the banks discount eligible securities to you and you provide
them, they repo those securities, and I just wonder – it seems technically possible for this to
be done in the super system, but there just doesn’t seem to be any appetite for it. Am I right
about that?
Brad Jones
The question for us would be why, and I guess the starting point – well, the first point I
would make, actually, is, I think as I probably said in response to a similar question last year, is
it would be prudent to manage your liquidity in a way that did not rely on the presumption of central
bank liquidity support.
Let me take a step back and just explain why central banks internationally have, for the better part
of 150 years, thought about this differently in respect to banks. As a society we have
collectively made a decision that banks perform really valuable tasks, socially useful tasks, but we
also recognise that the way that they’re configured introduces some tail risks that, if they
were to be realised, could have magnified effects because of the way that the credit creation
mechanism works. So to insure against that risk what central banks and regulators, in our case APRA,
have done, is to be very clear about the requirements to hold very, very significant liquidity
buffers for extreme tail risks and to be very intrusive in the oversight regime, also to deal with
moral hazard issues that always underlies the emergency liquidity issue.
Super funds are fundamentally different to banks in a number of the dimensions I mentioned at the
outset. The main one is the liabilities are not runnable in the same way they are for banks, and also
the leverage piece is fundamentally different. There are very significant constraints on this
industry being able to take on leverage. Now, there are constraints for banks as well, but banks are
significantly more levered than they are super funds. So there’s big structural differences
there that sit behind this.
Now, there’s also the case that central banks need not only in a crisis have the option of
lending to individual institutions. They can also potentially act as market maker of last resort.
That is, liquify the underlying markets that are turning dysfunctional. And central banks, including
the Reserve Bank, in a crisis have been prepared to act as market maker of last resort in the markets
that are relevant to the transmission of monetary policy. So for us that’s Australian Government
securities market and the FX market. We’ve done that through history. All other central banks
have. So this sort of lender of last resort function is not just an institutional construct, it can
relate to markets.
So that’s a long winded way of me coming back to my opening observation. It would be prudent to presume that that
option would not be available, and I think there’s very good reasons that super funds
shouldn’t ever get themselves into a situation where that would be needed.
Questioner
I totally get all the nuances here, but during the GFC a reasonable amount of super was locked up
quietly. The next time around there’ll be a hell of a lot more Australians in retirement who
actually are looking for a flow of income draw downs out of those funds that simply wasn’t
present last time, but I do get all your points and I promise I will not ask this question next year.
David Bell
I’ll hold him to that one for you, Brad. I can see a question down there.
Questioner
I did just want to commend you on – and ASIC as well on Project Acacia. I’m just
interested, any of the use cases in terms of the innovation that you’re most excited about
outside of Northern Trust’s?
Brad Jones
Let me answer that in a different way. Where we are seeing industry most interested is in the fixed
income markets. That seems to be – and that, by the way, is something that we’ve also
observed with our international peers, and the way that’s playing out today, for instance, is
that the area where you’re seeing the tokenisation really take off in the US is in money market
funds and repo. So what we’re hearing from industry is we see frictions in our fixed income
markets, we think there’s some exciting opportunities there, let’s kick the tyres harder.
We’ve been profiting through Project Acacia basically a sandbox – for those that are not
familiar with that project, a sandbox, a pilot – to better understand what innovation needs to
happen to create better functionality for both issuers, but also for investors, and I suspect
whatever the next iteration, whatever comes after Project Acacia, I suspect – well, I can say
– it would be terrific to have big investors, perhaps from this room, outside this room,
it’s an equal opportunity space, to come and explore how our financial system can work more
efficiently than it is today. We’re thinking about this not from a one or two year perspective.
I’m trying to think about how could the financial system be fundamentally different in
10 or 20 years’ time. There’s tokenisation maybe – there’s no
guarantees – it may be an innovation that we look back on in the same way that the move from a
paper-based system to electronic system. This could be the new epoch. Certainly the more optimistic
characterisations would have you believe that’s the case. We’re still interrogating that.
We’re still challenging and stress testing that proposition, but we need big investors to get
interested in experimentation in this space for us to really understand if there’s something
there worth pursuing.
David Bell
I’m going to begin to finish up via a final question for you, Brad. This has been a great
session. Thank you for making the time, thank you for being so open, particularly on geopolitics, the
connections between the system, the need for prudence and thinking more broadly in the way we think
about risk and so forth. The question is trying to connect banking and superannuation. Banks
transform liquidity, they borrow short and lend out long in terms of mortgages. The super industry
has its own strange liquidity transformation. It provides daily liquidity to most of its members and
it invest often in long dated, sometimes illiquid assets. Have you ever just looked at that and said,
wow, is that actually – that’s quite a quirky feature of this system?
Brad Jones
I mean, the two systems are different in a number of the ways that I’ve already discussed. I
think more of where my interest and attention in this space, and it’s a different focus than my
colleagues at APRA or ASIC, the direct regulators are thinking much more about the system at large,
and there’s just a number of things that are going to happen in the next 10 to
20 years in the industry in aggregate that are just going to look very different and will impact
our financial system very differently, and the growth of the share and retirement assets, the growth
of funds being deployed offshore, all of that is part of that mix and we look forward to continuing
the dialogue because – I’ve had conversations with a number of people in this room –
we’ve certainly enjoyed that interaction, learnt a lot. Hopefully it’s of some value for us
to give a read-out on overarching assessment, but I’m sure we’re all going to learn a lot
in the next five years.
David Bell
Great closing comments. Please thank Assistant Governor of the Reserve Bank, Dr Brad Jones.
Brad Jones
Thanks, David. Cheers. Thank you.