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Agustín Carstens opened Point Zero Forum 2026 with a call for policymakers to find the "sweet spot" between unleashing private-sector innovation and safeguarding stability and trust — then walked through what that balance actually looked like across three forces reshaping finance at the time: AI, stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies (CBDC).
AI's real risk isn't inside any single institution — it's the sameness across all of them
AI adoption across fraud detection, liquidity management, and compliance was already mainstream, with the sector approaching a $20 billion market and near-90% adoption among major financial institutions. What worries Carstens is the dozens of systemically important institutions running AI built on the same data, the same vendors, the same underlying logic — creating a kind of systemic groupthink where the same signal triggers the same response everywhere, with no human judgment in between. And when an AI-driven decision causes real harm, it's still unclear who's actually accountable: the institution, the vendor, or whoever built the training data.
Carstens has changed his mind on stablecoins, but trust still isn't there yet
While he was openly skeptical of crypto and stablecoins a few years ago, today he saw real value in what they can do for financial inclusion, cost, and efficiency. His concern was no longer the technology — it was the foundation. Stablecoin regulation is still fragmented across jurisdictions, and building the kind of global, cooperative trust that fiat currencies took decades to earn is lagging behind how fast the technology itself is moving.
Carstens argued central banks needed to move faster on wholesale CBDCs, paired with well-regulated tokenized deposits, with stablecoins interoperating alongside them — echoing the "Finternet" model he co-authored with Nandan Nilekani. None of these tools are magic on their own. The real work is in building the bridge between the trust and stability of the traditional two-tier banking system and the efficiency of the new tokenized one.
Speaker:
Agustín Carstens, International Advisory Board Member, Global Finance & Technology Network (GFTN); Visa Economic Empowerment Institute Member, Visa; Board Member, UBS; Former General Manager, Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Bank for International Settlements (BIS)
Point Zero Forum 2026 | Zurich, Switzerland
