Standard Chartered Bank invited Matthew to keynote its first ever Fintech Festival in Ghana, where he spoke alongside Ken Ofori-Atta, Ghana's Minister of Finance, to an audience of fintech entrepreneurs from across Africa, Ghanaian government representatives and local organisations. His keynote, The Future of Banking, Money, and Payments, set out both the obvious and non-obvious future of financial services.
He began with the forces accelerating global disruption, then opened up new business models and ideas: crypto mining cars and cities, and a demonstration of how a simple Web 3.0 smart fridge could disrupt global banking, which he was later told was one of the highlights of the session.
"Talking about the future of money is the wrong conversation to have, when really we should be talking about the future of value instead."Matthew Griffin, Ghana, December 2022
After unpacking the industry's broken business model, the rise of Bank 4.0 and fintechs, he showed how gaming companies such as Epic could use Decentralised Finance (DeFi) to disrupt not only the industry's incumbents but also Big Tech's ambitions in the sector.
On money, he stressed the importance of asking the right questions, showed how fiat currencies could be disrupted, and argued that the real conversation is not about the future of money but the future of value. On payments, he pushed the audience to explore ideas that make them uncomfortable, such as paying with moves, play or time, as companies including Ikea and Nike already do.
Afterwards he held a lengthy round table with Standard Chartered's CEO and leadership team, covering the future of the bank's business model and physical branches, its investment methodologies and its approach to ESG.
