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BIS Deputy General Manager Andréa Maechler opens with a deceptively simple question: what actually makes money, money? Her keynote walks through the "two-tier" system that underpins today's financial system, and what has to survive as the world moves into tokenized finance.
Trust in money isn't a vibe. It's a mechanism
Central banks issue risk-free "public money." Banks issue private money — the deposits in your account — but what makes those deposits trustworthy is that banks can always convert them into central bank money. That guarantee is the whole reason you can accept a payment from a bank you've never dealt with, no questions asked. Take that mechanism away, and money stops being interchangeable.
Non-bank finance has taken over — but it still leans on this same system
Non-bank financial institutions (asset managers, insurers, money market funds) now hold more than half of all global financial assets. Yet, only around 10–15% of that $500 trillion is "actual money." The rest is credit and investment that still depends on banks, and ultimately central bank reserves, to settle safely, especially when the system is under stress.
Today's stablecoins skip that safety net
Because most stablecoins sit on public, permissionless rails with no direct link to central bank money, they aren't interoperable with each other and can lose credibility exactly when it matters most. Pointing to one model for building trust into tokenized money, Andréa Maechler spotlighted Project Agora — a landmark public-private collaboration uniting multiple major central banks and over 40 regulated financial institutions to explore the tokenisation of wholesale cross-border payments.
Speaker:
Andréa Maechler, Deputy General Manager of Bank for International Settlements (BIS)
Point Zero Forum 2026 | Zurich, Switzerland
