Banks to choose what you can buy

Report reveals structure for financial compliance

- by ESCAPE KEY

IMAGINE that your payment for a product doesn't go through until a third party confirms that the item meets certain criteria.

That could be your carbon footprint, social credit score, medical compliance, whatever. Not a voluntary check you choose to make, but a programmed condition built into the payment itself.

The infrastructure to make this work is being built right now by the world's most powerful financial institutions, and they are surprisingly explicit about it. It's no longer just pilots and prototypes; parts of this system are already operational.

On June 20, 2023, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published its Annual Economic Report 2023, Chapter III (Blueprint for the future monetary system), proposing a unified ledger: a programmable financial market infrastructure combining central bank digital currencies, tokenised deposits, and tokenised real-world assets.

What they propose is a single programmable platform where tokenised money (central bank digital currencies) and tokenised assets (carbon credits, digital product passports, securities) interact automatically.

The BIS frames this not as one option among many, but as a fundamental design principle.