Greg Kidd on the Facebook pivot and the future of value exchange

globaliD co-founder and CEO Greg Kidd is in Bangkok, Thailand this week for The Asian Banker’s 20th annual Future of Finance Summit along with visionary leaders from Mozilla, Microsoft, and Ripple, among others.

Greg will be sharing the stage with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales for the event’s opening keynote, where he will discuss the future of the “collaborative and shared economy” and how fintech startups will help shape that feature.

Directly afterward, Greg will be leading a speaker session focusing on new approaches to digital identity.

In the lead up to the conference, Greg published a piece with Asian Banker providing his insights on Facebook’s recent privacy pivot along with his vision for the future of value exchange:

What does the future of our exchange society look like? Who will get us there, and why? Will it be banks? Phone companies? Governments? Fintechs? Will the world be more Big Brother, Mad Max, or creepy Facebook? Or is there another path that is less dystopian and more human? Will we be able to shape the future, or will it roll over us like a huge unstoppable snowball?

Some key points:

• The future need be neither Mad Max nor Big Brother.
• Messaging is the killer app of the 21st century (and also the fundamental driver for Facebook’s “privacy” pivot).
• Many traditional industry players—banks, tech companies, fintechs—could very well miss the boat despite their current positioning and resources as a result.
• The role of crypto as a catalyst for innovation in a heavily regulated space.
• Why WhatsApp/Telegram/WeChat are the “pre-internet” AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy of this cycle.
• The history of the internet suggests that messaging rails of the future will be open and interoperable.
• Underpinned by an alternative vision for identity—whereby value exchange is routed through a neutral namespace (much like DNS and websites).

Read the full piece at Asian Banker

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