Anna: Welcome back to the Noyack Expert Series, where financial education meets real-world expertise. I’m Anna, your producer and host for the day from Noyack Wealth Club, a 501 nonprofit with the mission of financial literacy for young adults. Today we are here with Driss Temsamani, is that correct?
Driss: It’s perfect.
Anna: Perfect. He’s a seasoned digital banking executive and he served as the managing director and America’s head of digital for Treasury and trade solutions at Citigroup. He oversees digital transformation across North and Latin America and he’s worked at Citi for quite some time so we’ve seen a lot of the changes in this space. He’s driven innovation in e-business commercial banking AI blockchain financial inclusion while also at the same time advocating for diaspora engagement and serving in global entrepreneurship initiatives.
How on earth do you have the time for all of those?
Driss: Passion.
Passion and curiosity.
When work gets blurred with play and you’re curious to learn and experiment, it becomes just, it blurs the lines between what is work and what is personal life, and it’s all part of that growth story that leads us to eventually leave a legacy behind.
Anna: What got you into this industry in the first place?
Driss: I got into it, I would say, by accident.
So I studied computer science and I became, I would say, an advisor, a consultant, in the intersection of technology and industrial marketing.
I worked with a lot of large firms that specialized in commerce and industries that mostly focused on telecom and media, as well as publishing.
Then I had an opportunity to consult with Citi.
So I started in Citi in 1994 as a consultant to look at a project that was electronifying and automating the credit process.
So loans in general terms.
That’s how it got me started at Citi.
So I had no idea 30 years later I would still be here.
But I was consulting back in the days with Citi on a platform called Lotus Notes, which I was an expert at and trying to connect 23 countries across Latin America through satellite connections to this application, credit application.
Yeah, here we are today, 2025, talking about blockchain and AI.
Anna: Yeah, that’s really cool.
I always think, especially when it comes to tokenization, AI, blockchain, it’s really cool to see the evolution of how all of that has come to be.
To someone who’s just approaching this space, what are some of the key things they should know about tokenization, blockchain, digital currencies?
What should they know, how it all works?
Driss: So we are facing a challenge.
The internet that we use today has evolved mainly around the digital experiences that many companies have built on it, but the underlying infrastructure of the internet is becoming almost obsolete, it’s being challenged.
It is a database, non-interoperable infrastructure that lacks digital identity and lacks a form of money.
So we use a lot of systems and databases today to conduct business that don’t talk to each other and use multiple formats.
Also, the form of money, it’s still physical.
So we have to settle in physical cash or physical fiat currency. We have this situation where half of the world’s population still does not have access to financial services because of this Internet infrastructure that’s very expensive to operate for banks, especially on the fact that identity lacks in the Internet.
So you could literally be in four or five different places at the same time and we have to physically establish your identity with paper because there is no way to know who you are in the Internet unless we grab documentation from you and physically establish who you are and then store it in a database again.
So blockchain, since 2008, while the hype was around cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin and all that, what was really significant in the emergence of Bitcoin in 2008 was the technology that it uses.
That technology allows us to upgrade the internet.
It allows us to finally take the internet that we use today to conduct business and give it an upgrade that has a digital identity, that has a technology that allows us to tokenize regulated money or to tokenize deposit, tokenize payments and it really…
Anna: For someone who’s unfamiliar with some of these terms, what is the act of tokenizing something, especially financially?
Driss: Yeah, so when you have a physical asset and it doesn’t have to be physical, but let’s just focus for now on physical assets, you can actually create a form of those assets in a blockchain that makes them unique.
So think of the best example I can give is today we take photos with our phone and so I’ll take a photo of this session that we’re having right now.
I’ll grab the screenshot of the session and I’ll send it to someone.
So now I have the original because I took it and somebody else has a copy.
That person can take that copy of the image or the picture that I took and send it to somebody else.
Six months later, a year later, we have a lot of this screenshot of you and I talking, but who has the original?
So we have to physically, or we have to create a mechanism by which my original photo is notarized and someone has to stamp it and basically says, “This is the original picture that was taken.”
Because the internet does not allow us to transfer, it allows us to share.
So all information today is shared.
When you tokenize, if we were to tokenize the photo, if we put the photo app on a blockchain, and if our phones are nodes now connected to that blockchain, which is basically hooking up to the blockchain, so that’s what would be called the node, a node.
When I, in that kind of architecture, when I take the photo or the screenshot, and I send it to you or send it to someone it would be burned on my phone and then recreated on the phone of the person that received it. If that person sends it to somebody same will happen. It will get eliminated or burned in their phone and then recreated in the other person’s phone. We will only have one token form of that photo at all times then never two of them exist and all of us, all the participants in that blockchain that potentially received that photo will be logged.
So we will know who took that photo, who received it, who sent it, and so forth and so on.
We will know the entire history from the time the photo was created until the time it resided on the last note or the last phone.
Think of that effect of technology on money or on, let’s say, a document that proves you’re the owner of an asset, of a home potentially, of an apartment or let’s say you own a piece of art.
Potentially physical assets and non-physical assets can be tokenized and the technology that will carry that information will operate in the way that I described it.
The same way you have for example stock certificates.
Stock certificates have a number and so when you sell your share it goes to somebody else.
Anna: Right.
Driss: So we can trace shares of a company by owners.
So imagine that effect on a dollar bill.
Imagine that effect on potentially programmable money used for certain use cases.
So you could program money in the future.
Fiat currency, regulated money, you could program it for certain use.
If you want to block its usage for something else, you can create loyalty programs on it, because in addition to tokenizing assets, you can make them programmable, you can make them smart and you can create conditions on that because of blockchain which are called smart contracts.
So you could say if Anna receives this money then release the merchandise that Anna was selling only if she receives the token.
That will be embedded in the money.
We don’t need another database, we don’t need another technology.
We can embed that in the flow of money.
All of this today works very different with the Internet.
Anna: Right.
Driss: The money resides in one platform or the initiation of the money, the conditions or the, let’s say, the contracts on that money on another database, the identity of who’s transacting in another database, and so forth, so on.
There are many databases that have to connect, exchange information, and if they’re not interoperable, that’s cycle time delays, that’s cost, that’s inefficiency.
So that is the challenge that I said in the beginning, that is the call to action.
We got to upgrade this internet that we use today to something more modern, more programmable, more efficient, and that is the promise of blockchain, which allows us to tokenize and create digital identity and other benefits.
Anna: Okay, here’s another question.
I’m seeing a lot in the news different things about tokenizing alternative assets, such as private credit.
How does that work within these systems?
Driss: Yeah, so think of, so the best way to understand that is to know how it works today and the infrastructure it uses and the intermediaries and all the parties that have to be involved.
Take a step back and look at all the manual touchpoints, the different processes, the people involved, the errors that can be generated, the potential, I’ll just call this what it is, the inefficiency.
I think our planet is bogged down by inefficiencies.
I think we spend a lot of our time today just dealing with processes that are inefficient, be it in education, in healthcare, in transportation.
It doesn’t matter what it is, it has legacy systems and legacy processes that just cannot progress or get modernized because of the infrastructure.
The infrastructure is not a smart infrastructure.
We need a smart infrastructure.
Hence, and I’ll answer your question also because I didn’t tackle it right away, but you really cannot talk about AI or agentic AI without an infrastructure that’s also smart.
‘Cause AI, for AI to take actions, it has to work on an infrastructure.
If that infrastructure is not smart, then you really are not going to reach the benefits that AI promises today, especially agentic AI.
But to your question, look, there are many ways to tokenize existing assets, existing financial transactions. I think the best one that really may answer your question is look at for example real estate, okay if you look at real estate. Today if you want to invest in a real estate portfolio you could not for example say I want to put fifty dollars or a thousand dollars on the zip code where I live today which is 33131. So you could literally zoom in on a zip code somewhere in the United States and say, I want to put $1,000 on any property in that zip code that if it sells as a portfolio, I can benefit from the appreciation of that portfolio.
So when you tokenize, it allows you to take, to create new marketplaces.
Could be energy, by the way.
You could be storing energy through your solar panel and tokenizing that energy and selling it into a marketplace, into a blockchain, and having people participate and actually you know benefiting from that energy that now you’re selling to a marketplace in a form of tokenization or it could be even just basically investing in that.
I’ll give you another example that I love to use which I saw in a country in Latin America, which is Paraguay.
So there was a need to raise capital in the country of Paraguay for the forestry industry.
So basically these are farmers that farm trees and then eventually they’ll sell the pulp, they’ll sell the wood, and they need the capital.
So this company, I believe, if I’m not mistaken in Switzerland, created an app, you could look up online, it’s called Treecoin or CoinTrees, where basically anyone in the world could actually take their money from a bank account, send it to their wallet, and then buy coins which are representations of trees in Paraguay that are real trees.
So what happened is the farmers would get the capital, but you could track from beginning to sell when the seed was planted the tree was grown and then eventually it was was converted to pulp and wood and you could sell the profits put them back into your bank account in dollars or whatever currency you’re using or you could just keep investing in coins which now you’re really tracking your coins that are representations of trees. So this is when you actually are connecting real physical assets or industries or real world, I would say, resources.
You tokenize that to allow for people to participate by converting their fiat currency to tokens, put them on a blockchain and actually have, make profits or just invest.
This is not payment, right?
We’re just talking about pure investments that can happen in a blockchain when you allow for this tokenization.
Anna: Yeah, so it’s another way to digitally invest in either other digital assets or things that are tangible.
Driss: Correct.
So you can invest in a token or a piece of the asset that then goes along the blockchain as it passes hands and creates more value.
All tied to a digital identity that you’d have to establish outside in a different database, tied to potential smart contracts, and programmability that would say if this happened, then do this, do that, but it’s the same coin.
There’s information.
That’s the best part where if you need to access information, you don’t need to call, use APIs or use some type of a form to connect to multiple entities and multiple databases just so we can pull information to use it for reconciliation or potentially just to prove what you have and because it’s all part of the token.
It’s one token that has everything embedded in it as part of an infrastructure that allows for collaboration and for multi-entity participation so we fix the interoperability issue that we have today with the internet.
Anna: Yeah, it seems like it’s a lot.
You can get all of that information that would otherwise be stored in seven different places.
You just have it all at once and even as it continues to move along to different people, you still have, you can track all of the information in the same place.
Driss: That’s correct.
I’m an advocate for this to be transparent and regulated in the sense that we want to build trust in this.
Trust is an important element of the DNA of financial services.
Without trust, you don’t have a financial system.
So regulation tends to create the rules of the game and the transparency for the participants and for those that offer the services and those that acquire the services.
If that trust is not there, then potentially people will abandon and move to something different.
So I’m a strong believer that when we build this infrastructure, it has to have clear rules and regulations so that the participants know exactly what to do and don’t create instability that will make the consumers run away from it.
Anna: With all of this in mind, do you think that tokenization and blockchain structures are just simply the next stage of the digitization journey or is it just a fundamentally new thing in global finance?
Is it a continuation of things or is it something just different altogether?
Driss: It’s a great question.
Look, digital transformation was very different, continues to be very different from what many companies did back in the seventies, eighties and nineties, which was to electronify their processes.
Automating processes is different than digitally transforming.
When you automate processes, you’re going after efficiency.
When you’re digitally transforming, you’re changing the way you do things.
You’re changing your business operating model.
You’re changing how you reach consumers.
You’re changing how you do things in your back office.
You have to rethink.
Technology is not just a back office play, it becomes a front office play.
It’s an end-to-end model that changes.
That’s why digital native companies are born with a business model different than those that are traditional companies that have to transform, because they have to change the way they do business, completely from back to front.
So having said that, what was lacking in this digital transformation that we’ve seen in the last 30 years, and it has accelerated tremendously in the last 15 years, is an infrastructure.
While everything is about seven by 24 and that we have to accelerate the movement of money, we did not rethink the fundamental infrastructure behind the movement of money and the fundamental infrastructure behind formats and identity and conditions on the transactions and everything that has to be embedded in the digital experience.
That’s where blockchain comes to play.
By the way, so if anything, blockchain is going to improve the financial market infrastructure and enhance the infrastructure overall for doing business. AI and agentic AI is the ultimate promise because AI is going to move us beyond digital transformation, because now we’re not just changing the business operating model and how we conduct business, we’re injecting intelligence in the business operating model. So what AI is going to allow us now to do is put intelligence in the process.
That is quite different than a digital transformation.
When now you’re embedding intelligence in your process, it’s almost like when you boot your company, you boot it with intelligence.
It’s like an operating system across the enterprise.
Anna: Okay.
Yeah.
That’s sort of just how AI isn’t inherently, AI isn’t inherently tied into it, but it does come hand in hand with a lot of these tokenization, blockchain conversations.
It doesn’t take very long for AI to pop up in there as well, as you saw just here.
We’re talking about tokenization, but we have, there’s been quite a bit of talk about AI as well.
Where do you see AI and sort of these more advanced analytics intersecting with tokenization?
How do those two relate to each other?
Because again, you bring up one, the other inevitably comes up soon enough.
Driss: Yes, even more when you say agentic AI.
As soon as you ask AI to take an action, you now have to think about, okay, it’s taking an action on an infrastructure.
That action has to now write not only your internal infrastructure, but the external infrastructure.
The dilemma is, okay, so do AI agents have an identity?
Are they empowered and do they have the entitlement to take actions on behalf of who?
So when an enterprise allows for actions to be taken internally in the enterprise and externally in the enterprise, we start to go back to the same issue of how secure this infrastructure is.
How efficient is this infrastructure?
Do you have to collect signatures now on the AI agents to authorize for taking an action?
Again, so who’s going to authorize, who’s going to approve?
What are the legalities around that action?
So what we still have in the internet as the fundamental infrastructure or the core infrastructure of conducting business, AI, Agentic AI will encounter issues.
So we will have to build a lot of guardrails just to unleash Agentic AI on the financial market infrastructure and the business infrastructure.
So with blockchain, you are now much closer to that ultimate efficiency that all businesses are looking for, which is not only you’re embedding intelligence in your business operating model, but you’re putting your business operating model on a smart infrastructure that has a native stack to create tokenization with digital identity, interoperability, and the data that you’re going to have access to without having to request it.
In my industry, for example, you would not need bank statements for reconciliation because they’ll be part of the token, the information in the token, as an example.
So you make an API call and you initiate the transaction, you put the conditions on that transactions, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days.
You create a contract in that transaction that says as soon as the token hits the account or the wallet, release the merchandise.
The whole time you have access to information needed for reconciliation.
Who paid, how they paid, where they paid, when they paid, what they paid for, all of that is in the token.
So as you can see, Agentic AI’s promise is when you have a tokenized infrastructure built on blockchain.
That’s when our society, industries, our life, and how we conduct business every day or how we consume and how we work changes completely.
You start to see a lot of the inefficiency go away.
A lot of the repetitive low-value activities go away.
Anna: Yeah, because it’s so much just at once.
You don’t have to be thinking for the same thing over and over again.
Driss: You see us then focus a lot more on high value activity.
This is why I call this an augmentation.
It’s not about job replacement.
It’s not about AI taking our jobs or agent AI doing what we do, but it’s offloading low value activities with us always being in the loop, with the humans always being the checker, not the maker.
Then we start to focus on high value activities and issues surrounding our planet that we have not been able to solve for a long time just because there are not enough resources to focus on them.
Anna: Okay. Here’s a question. I know we touched on this a little bit with a lot of the risks and development and changes that are happening both on the investment side but also more on the business side. With tokenization has regulation caught up to that and if not, which regulation is never caught up to where especially when things are moving this fast, and where do you think the regulation needs to be in order for blockchain to be a successful technology and a technology that can be, have a longevity to it I guess overall both business investment wise just as a technology? What regulations do we need to put in place?
Driss: You’d be surprised on how number one, the thinking of central banks around the world is on this modernization.
As a matter of fact, many central banks, 90% plus of central banks around the world, have what I would call, or what they would call, a digital policy.
This digital policy sits next to the fiscal and monetary policy.
So they look at digital policy as a way of stimulating the economy.
Why?
A lot of the countries around the world have a very large informal economy.
This informal economy can be from 40% to almost sometimes 70% of the GDP.
It’s an economy dominated by cash, where people work and get paid, and the money just circulates outside the financial system.
Central banks are looking at what are the ways we can modernize this infrastructure that will bring some of these flows from the informal economy to the formal economy, where they can be converted to deposits that don’t exist in bank accounts today, and deposits become loans, and loans are the engine of the small-medium sized businesses, microfinance, and that’s what really stimulates the economy organically.
The size of that globally is $25 trillion.
Just to get an idea, 10% adoption of a digital money financial market infrastructure modernization brings about a hundred billion dollars to bank accounts that didn’t exist which is converted to ninety billion dollars worth of loans. Significance and that’s just ten percent of the adoption. So they, the central banks are motivated to modernize the financial market infrastructure and the business infrastructure. So you would hear things about stablecoins central bank digital currencies open banking instant payments. These are all elements or parts of the I would call part of the pieces of the puzzle that they’re trying to build to put together and that today globally is very active.
So if you look at the case of India which was an early case with UPI and Aadhaar as digital identity, the UPI which was the form of the instant payments, digital wallets, virtual accounts, this was all part of a modernization where cash start to be used less and less.
You have fintechs, you have big techs that were coming in to connect the last mile of the population that was only using smartphones, but did not have bank accounts.
But now with their smartphone, with a QR code, someone can pay them and they can pay at a point of sales and you start to see a modernization.
This is all part of that infrastructure that I’m talking about.
Of course the ultimate of that is tokenization.
The ultimate, the last piece that you put in that puzzle to complete the picture is how do you now put blockchain as a clearance system, as part of an FMI, as an FMI, for payments, as an example.
Yeah, so the world is moving toward that.
We’ve seen an acceleration, and in the next five years, we’ll see even more.
You can easily look at that just in the public domain and search how many central banks are working on this initiatives, these initiatives, and even several of them have come together with the IMF and the BIS and formed something called Project Agora.
Project Agora is now several central banks coming together to solve for how will this work in a cross-border way.
So they’re coming to connect each other’s initiatives to create a global network, a tokenized global network using blockchain of how to conduct this modernization for better efficiency and to continue the modernization, the global modernizations that we see with the digital economy.
Anna: It seems like a lot, both on the individual investor side, but also on more of the banking, business, institutional side of things, that tokenization and blockchain.
It’s not necessarily that they’re opening up brand new doors for people.
They’re not necessarily democratizing access, but it’s more of a modernization and efficiency increase and the democratizing of access to some things is just the consequence of it because it is more efficient and is more modern.
There’s more we can do.
Does that seem about right?
Driss: There are two pieces here.
One is infrastructure and the infrastructure is as critical as the point you made.
Without that infrastructure and a regulated one, you really cannot create a highway on which we can all do business in a modern way, that is compatible with the digital economy.
I mean, cash is not compatible with the digital economy.
You cannot do e-commerce with cash.
It’s just, I mean, you need electronic money, but electronic money, again, has its limitations in the way, especially in the interoperability.
How many QR codes are you going to have, right?
I mean, there’s no global standard for a QR code.
If you do something on a blockchain and you hook up a blockchain with an interoperable way.
But infrastructure aside, we also have to talk about segmentation.
So the world population is divided in a way between those that are clients of platforms.
So these are users of e-commerce platform, messaging platforms, or social media platforms, and they have access with a cell phone to these digital experiences.
These companies that provide these digital experiences can embed payments into those digital experiences.
So that segment of the population of the planet can be connected to financial services in that approach, where these, we call them the fintechs and the big techs can come in and connect the last mile of this population that we have today is outside the financial system, and that’s a big book of work that we see the benefits of it today.
The other one is traditional bank account users.
These are privileged people that have a bank account, a debit card, checking account, and today can use the card to buy things from a website and have them delivered to their homes.
In the middle of these two segments, because those are banked, those that are becoming banked through platforms by fintechs and big techs.
We also have the gig economy, very important piece of the economy that’s growing that are free employment.
So today, you have access to a cell phone, you have a bicycle in an emerging market country.
You have a bicycle, you download an app, and you can deliver pizza to somebody’s house.
You’re going to get paid through the wallet and the phone.
In the past, you could have been part of that informal economy, getting paid in cash.
So now you have access to financial services.
So between the gig economy and the platform providers to a lot of the embanks, a year, two years, three years down the road, you have a credit history.
‘Cause now you’ve been paid to that wallet, now we know who you are.
Now you have an identity.
Now potentially you can walk into a bank and open a bank account because you have now potentially enough information, credit information that you could ask for a small loan and you can start saving and your life improves so it’s a social and economic impact.
Anna: This is a complete pivot from the route this conversation has gone but one of the things that when it comes to money that’s has been tokenized one of the questions a lot of people who are maybe skeptical of this just as an entity as a whole is the liquidity issue. How do tokenized assets and liquidity work together?
What’s the relationship there?
Driss: Well, look, you could look at it from a stable coin example and as regulations become clearer, stable coin issuers will need to hold their reserves with banks and so it be it’s T-bills or just dollars in bank accounts that back every stable coin in circulation, that’s one.
But I’d like to think of the especially payments and how money is used in different, I don’t know if I can call it colors or categories or different attributes. So kind of color coding the flows and the reason why is a lot of the, let’s say, stablecoin usage today has to do with social media payments, so people that actually work in social media, like influencers and those that potentially have some type of scheduled payments, more payments, they get paid in stablecoins.
There are some remittances and there may be other similar flows, but those are not your traditional million dollar transfer, they’re not your traditional payments for an asset that needs to basically reacquiring assets or you’re doing some type of a large transaction. So if we can think of payments in different categories or if we can color code or put attributes on flows, we will start to understand the impact on liquidity differently.
If you put it all together potentially you may not be able to resolve some of these issues and we’ll still need to resolve them with a lot more scrutiny and a lot more, I would say, consultations across industry.
But I think if we tackle the embanked, let’s talk about that because it’s a big topic for me.
Financial inclusion is something I care about a lot.
If we just look at the informal economy and the embanked, those flows are very different than the traditional banking flows.
They tend to revolve very fast.
So if money comes in, money comes out.
It tends to be small amounts.
It tends to be high volume, low value and high frequency.
If you have that, you can build a clearing system and you can tokenize it, including the payments and potentially short term deposits.
You can tokenize all of that without any potential impact as if you do it for different type of flows.
Anna: So it’s just very much a case by case situation, depending on what exactly is tokenized, how much you have of it, what it’s being used for.
It’s a little less cut and dry than a traditional, okay, I own a house that’s not liquid at all.
It’s very much a case by case.
Driss: Yes, and I believe this is how solving for this should start with that question.
What are we trying to do?
It shouldn’t be just taking technology and applying it to everything we’re doing.
It should be, what’s the problem?
What is it that we’re trying to fix?
Is this technology or this infrastructure, architecture, is this the solution for that?
We solve it for that.
We create a way to measure the impact of it.
Then we reassess.
But it’s not just, let’s just basically apply it to everything we do, and that’s not the answer.
Anna: Right.
I think there are at the same time a lot more applications of tokenization and blockchain than the average person might think of.
There’s a lot more to this technology than what meets the eye.
A lot of the times when you hear about tokenization and blockchain, it’s often in the media exclusively in the world of Bitcoin and crypto.
Driss: Yes, correct.
Anna: It does extend far beyond Bitcoin crypto far beyond even the investment and the alternative investments that we touched on a little bit.
Driss: It’s a much bigger technology.
It’s a revolutionary technology that solves a lot of problems when we need to have a unique representation of an asset or of a transaction, anything that will eliminate inefficiency that gets created when we have to trace when we have to have exchange of formats because of lack of interoperability, when we have to establish identity, when we have to rely on multiple hands-off and departments and databases to conduct a single transaction, the reliance on additional pieces of information that don’t exist in the moment of that transaction, all of that is inefficiency and cost.
The world is operating today at such speed and everything has collapsed.
So when you have to stop to get out of the highway, to have to take a little boat to go to an island, to get a piece of document, to come back in the boat, back to the highway to take your fast car.
I always say, what if we have a Miami to New York?
I live in Miami, so I like to use that example.
But what if I could fly from Miami to New York in 15 minutes, but then sit in the airport for three hours because of a process?
It does me no good.
Right, so that’s how we run business today.
We do certain things so fast, only to have to stop, to take several hours to finish that part of a process, because there is no modern infrastructure to go along the business model that we’re trying to implement.
Anna: We’ve talked a lot about the history of this technology, where it came from, what gaps it could fill.
If we’re looking ahead maybe five to ten years how do you see tokenization potentially transforming these traditional banking or capital markets?
Driss: Look I’ll tell you how I see it transforming the payment space okay but that’s also links up to the capital market space but the point is we wake up and we go to work from home in the office we travel and the backdrop of all of that is time and so our time is associated to activities activities that create value and that value is monetized and to me the future has an infrastructure where it all collapses.
It all collapses.
If your time is valued and it’s equivalent to something you get an hour, then how does that get traced?
Almost like a QR code if you’re buying something in a store that says it’s organic.
Can you trace it all the way to the seed?
From the time the seed was put in the ground all the way that it was farmed and brought to the store and transported to the store.
So when our time is part of an infrastructure where everything is now the way we just discussed tokenize, and it’s without having to go to how blockchain works, imagine every time you plug into an activity where your identity is linked to the activity, that eventually creates value and it’s monetized.
So imagine that now flowing in the form of payments, in a deposit, in a loan, in an investment.
Imagine how simple your life would be.
Imagine how a company will operate.
The simplicity of that versus what we have today, where we have to establish multiple things in different databases and have to connect them with interfaces.
If you want to just imagine more, now imagine infusing all of that with AI, with intelligence, where you are a human, but you have your digital twin that does low-value activities for you, while you focus on high-value activities, because of AI and agentic AI.
Just imagine a world like that, where going to the hospital to do labs or for a medical visit or education or studying or traveling, imagine how simple our life would become and how efficient it would become if it was riding on the top of a smart infrastructure like that, infused with AI.
Imagine how much time we would have to focus on more important things.
Anna: There’d be so much more time.
Yeah, well, before we close out for this episode, is there anything you want to touch on about AI, tokenization, blockchain, any of this that I completely forgot to mention?
Driss: Well okay it may not be something we see a lot of in the US although it has an angle but I always think about financial services and access to financial services as a fundamental piece for visibility and inclusion. You really can’t think about social economic development without access to credit, access to financial services in general.
As we build this modern infrastructure, and as we infuse it with AI, where AI meets blockchain, we got to think about how to make this inclusive to all.
‘Cause right now that’s not the case across the emerging markets around the world.
There are a lot of invisible people that walk around with cash because that’s the only way for them to live.
It’s the only way to pay, it’s the only way to get paid.
If that continues, most all of them don’t have a future where they have socioeconomic development as part of their path.
So giving them access should be embedded.
The same way as we got to embed proper regulations that protect consumers into the design and the architecture, we should also embed inclusivity in the design as well.
Anna: That’s a really good point, ’cause when you do think about where a lot of these technologies are gonna first start taking place, it’s in those areas that already have access to the services and they’re getting the upgraded version.
So making sure that spreads out.
I think that’s big for the global market as a whole, as well, in addition to the individual communities.
Driss: Absolutely, absolutely.
It’s an ecosystem.
It starts with a large corporation distributing something to a supermarket, potentially to a small, medium-sized store business, and someone walks in that has to pay for that.
Yes, it could be in a digital form if you have access, but most of our life is conducted with accessing and acquiring physical goods.
You can’t go very far without talking about what happened in COVID.
I mean, again, if you didn’t have a credit card, a debit card, and you could order food online and have something delivered to your house, and you have you were living in a country with a quarantine with police and army basically not allowing anybody to leave the home for the pandemic, then you start to feel that pain.
Then you realize you are invisible, you’re excluded, and that’s what we got to solve for as part of a design of a modern infrastructure that includes intelligence as we go forward.
Anna: I think that’s a really good closing bit.
I think that that is super important when it comes to all of these just new technologies and how they’re implemented.
Thank you so much for coming on and talking to us today about all of these very complicated topics that I know a lot of people want to know a little bit more about.
Your insights were incredibly valuable.
Thank you so much.
Is there anywhere you’d like us to send anyone who might be listening or watching to learn more about you or the work that you do?
Driss: Well, look, I’m very proud to work for a company like Citi that allows me to not only speak to clients and regulators and be out there advocating for a bank, as our CEO calls it, a bank with a soul.
So it’s not just being a banker and conducting banking business, but it’s also caring about the communities where we operate and the countries where we do business.
So look, most of my work is on LinkedIn, especially externally.
Yeah, not to self-promote my LinkedIn page, but if there’s anything I can contribute to through your channel, please count on me and Citi to always be the type of institution that cares, again, about the communities where we do business.
Anna: Yeah. Thank you so much again. This was a fantastic conversation. Thank you to our viewers for listening. We will see you on the next episode.
Driss: Thank you for inviting me.
Anna: Thank you so much.
