An Interview — Carlo Calarco, TaoDust Financial Advisor
TaoDust is proud to announce the latest addition to our expanding team — Carlo Calarco! His presence can already be felt within the company and we are very fortunate to be able to benefit from his experience within the Banking industry and wanted to share with you those insights.
The following is a short interview which covers the subjects on fin-tech, blockchain adaptation, the evolution of banking as well as the interest of the financial institutions in their own blockchain-like tokenization solutions. We hope that you can gain value from his responses as we have!
Q: You have always worked as a banking consultant, why have you decided to work in a project based on the Blockchain technology, a technology that aims to remove the intermediaries in the transactions; do you think that the Blockchain will revolutionize the fin-tech world?
In the first place, technological evolution is an external constraint that everyone must consider and to which no one can escape. From this point of view, it would be shortsighted for a bank to row against and ignore it. Indeed, we know that large international business banks such as JP Morgan or Bank of America, as well as central banks of the FED content, have long been investing in building blockchains to be used to optimize settlement operations (“settlement”) globally. But the banks were not the only that moved on this side, also several countries like Malta and Switzerland are making efforts in order to regulate this world.
Secondly, I am personally convinced that financial intermediaries can also find a role within this new paradigm. It has already happened in the past with the advent of the internet and its personal-trading platforms that have brought down the share of bank revenues deriving from pure securities brokering.
How did the pioneer banks respond? Building and offering innovative services with high added value such as, for example, financial research, purchasing and sales councils, electronic exchange platforms, etc.
In the case of Blockchain, too, in my view, financial intermediaries must respond in the same way: by providing services to clients. After all, the story is cyclical, when financial advisers began to sell funds, banks could not see the potential; today they make one of the core business.
Q: The world of small start-up investments has always been “mono-channel”, every new reality had to confront someone, such as professional investors, directly. With globalization and the advent of equity crowdfunding, every start-up can address a much wider audience.
Do you think that, for a start-up, having more investors holding the shares is cheaper than having just one? And what do you think is missing in the investment world for these emerging realities?
What venture capitalists did in the past, when they went into an exclusive mode in a startup, was not just bringing capital but above all knowledge. Indeed, some of them became start-up incubators, providing promoters with assistance in the business functions and basic knowledge they need, including support in trading with strategic counterparties.
In this sense, globalization has not only removed barriers to the movement of capital, but it has also removed information barriers by allowing a much wider audience to acquire sectoral knowledge and to do so much more quickly than in the past.
Today, therefore, much of this specialized information is no longer the rerogative of venture capitalists but is widespread thanks to the network and globalization. Therefore, having a single professional investor is not only no longer necessary but could even be harmful.
Q: After these considerations, what will be the role of banks in the field of investment for start-ups?
As I said at the beginning, banks must become service-providers, turning their services to both the startup itself and the underwriters who access it via blockchain.
To the promoters of the startup, banks can offer services of compliance regarding the regulations in force and the relationships with the supervisory authorities, treasury services for flow management and also commercial assistance services in the establishment of international partnership relationships.
To the capital subscribers, banks can provide market information, ratings, a personalized app for managing your portfolio of tokens and especially a constant reporting activity that updates investors on the state of the art of their investments.
Q: What are the extra resources that a professional figure like you can bring to this new reality such as TaoDust?
There are qualities and skills that accumulate over the course of a whole professional life, regardless of the technicalities employed, and that can be of great importance for the success of a startup.
Perhaps one of the most striking examples concerns the financial communication to investors that each startup must manage. Whether it is a classic IPO or a modern STO, the company being launched will have to manage the expectations of its investors through a careful communication strategy that have to follow very precise logic that a person of experience knows very well.
In this sense, my role as financial advisor to TaoDust could be as a supervisor of a communication service offered to clients who turn to our platform to manage communication to their investors. The project is great, the road is still long, but, as Walt Disney said, “If you can dream it, you can do it”.
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