Bank of England Governor Defends Cryptocurrencies Like Libra; ‘Payments Should Be Instantaneous’

Mark Carney, the Bank of England's Governor, has openly defended Facebook and it's new cryptocurrency project Libra this week. According to reports from local media outlets, he noted that the current financial system had several shortcomings and it was not efficient enough to make payments as fast as they should be.

So tech companies like Facebook, that want to get involved to help speed up the inefficiencies of the current payment process are welcome.

Carney believes that moving money around has a very high cost at the moment and that small businesses and entrepreneurs often pay too much for the transactions.

He affirms that what we have today is simply not enough. People should not be content with the situation, payments should be quicker, almost instantaneous and they should also be “virtually costless” and 100% resilient because we have the technology to do it.

Despite supporting initiatives such as the Libra, Carney admits that regulation is still a very important aspect. According to him, it is important to advance the sector and to achieve better results, however, it is not because of this that the companies are simply free from being scrutinized by the global authorities.

He compared this nascent industry to social media and affirmed that they are not going to be the same. Social media simply started and regulations came later. In this case, however, companies will only be allowed to launch their products after they got approval from regulators or this could create huge issues.

This was not the first time that Carney talked about a system that could be used for international payments. Before now, he affirmed that the world needed a system that could replace the U. S. dollar in a similar way to what the Libra could do.