Remarks by Mr Brad Jones, Assistant Governor (Financial System) of the Reserve Bank of Australia, at the Australian Payments Plus "Beyond Tomorrow" Forum, Sydney, 25 March 2026.
Introduction
Today I'd like to foreshadow the key findings from Project Acacia – our experimental project into opportunities to uplift the functioning of Australia's wholesale markets through the tokenisation of assets and money. Before I do, some historical scene setting is in order.
Seismic innovation in the way that assets and money move through the global financial system occurs rarely.
A reading of the history of past episodes suggests three enabling conditions stand out. First is a compelling economic value proposition from innovation that can be scaled to meet the changing demands of investors, issuers and the global economy. Second is technology that is up to the task of making the system more efficient and resilient. Third is public-private coordination to break through the inertia that often results from entrenched network effects in finance, and to overcome coordination failures when the ultimate payoffs to reform might be uncertain and likely to accumulate only over the longer term.
The last era to fit this characterisation was the transition from the centuries-old paper-based system of ledgers and money to an electronic system. As obvious as the benefits might now seem, this transformation did not occur overnight, nor did it occur without resistance from incumbents.
So what happened? In short, the increasing demands of market participants simply overwhelmed the ability of longstanding conventions to keep up. Wall Street found itself drowning in paper amid a host of institutional failures, so much so that in the early 1970s the US House of Representatives Committee on Commerce and Finance convened a special inquiry to investigate what could be done about the 'paper crisis'. The result was that Wall Street turned to the latest cutting edge technology of the time (computers) to keep track of the ownership of paper securities and confirmation of monetary settlement. This heralded the beginning of the end of the era where purchasing a financial security or accepting securities as collateral meant receiving a physical certificate in the post a week later.