The Broken Banking Industry | An Interview with Marcelo Garcia Casil

Foreign.

Thank you for joining us at cointelegraph. Can you do me a favor and just introduce yourself and your role real quick?

Sure. So my name is Marcelo. I'm the founder and CEO of MyCenas. MyCenas is a platform that allows anyone to buy and sell shares in artworks. So it's a bit like a NASDAQ for paintings really.

So your whole industry is your whole reason for being here is how blockchain will disrupt the finance industry.

Well, so we believe in positive disruption. So we don't want to destroy the industry, we want to improve it. We want to bring positive change. In our particular case, we want to open up a whole new asset class. So we believe that fine art is a very attractive way of protecting wealth over time. And wealthy families have used fine art to pass wealth through generations families. But the general population, people like you and me, people who are coming to this event, which by the wonderful, they've been excluded from these asset class.

So you're speaking about more touching the underserved using your platform and blockchain to approach the underserved community.

Absolutely. I mean, this is not about social impact. We are not to that level. So I don't want to pretend that we're helping the unbanked, because we're not. But we are helping the professional people who maybe make a bit of money and they have a bit of extra money and they don't want to. They don't know what to invest it on. Maybe they can spend a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars in buying shares of a Picasso Monet and they can see trading and going up and down in price.

How is that actually going to affect the old guards and how they look at your offering as compared to what they were offering?

Well, I think they're not yet feeling threatened because we're too small. And the concept may seem a bit far fetched for most of them. They are very conservative people who haven't really the way they conduct business for generations. The main players in this space are the auction houses, Sotheby's increase. They run 80% of the volume of the industry. And they've been operating exactly on the same way of processing auctions for the last three centuries. So we're not talking about hugely innovative industry, but we think that once we make a name for ourselves and we've seen the new kid on the block, they will be more willing to maybe engage in conversations with us. And we think that we can actually work with them, we can help them bring innovation into their own processes.

How much of the market share do you think that your company will be able to grab from the old regime?

Well, I'm going to just give you the typical 1% answer. If you can just take 1% of this $3 trillion industry and it will.

Be over the moon and then play with the math any way you want to from there.

Exactly. Okay.

It's fantastic. We all have, not all of us, but there's a large percentage of us that feel we've been taken advantage of by the banking industry, the finance industry, if you will, that exorbitant fees have been applied where it shouldn't apply. Will blockchain the technologies you have behind your company be able to eliminate those challenges of what we hate to see from the finance industry, which we call predatory practices?

Yeah, I mean, I know exactly what you mean. Just last week I had to send a £150 payment to our London office and I had to pay 22% in fees, including FX fees and cable charges and so on. So I fully understand, based on my personal experience running my company, what you're talking about. I personally feel very excited about a future where blockchain can eliminate these opportunities, where these players, because they happen to sit between two parties that need to send money across and they can afford the luxury of not being efficient. I wouldn't say they're necessarily deliberately deciding to rip people off. Some prefer to choose to think that due to the lack of market pressure, they are inefficient and they can afford to continue being inefficient and pass this inefficiencies back to us.

That was the most optimistic cover for big banks I've ever heard in my entire life.

I have banking experience. Most of my friends are in the banking industry. I don't want to upset them by saying outrageous things about them.

You know they're going to see this, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the. I mean, I'm not going to lie. I mean, there's a lot of bad actors in the banking industry. I mean, every time you open the paper now there's news about this bank getting fined in billions, but not following KYC practices for helping bad people laund the money and so on. So clearly there's something that's broken in the industry and it needs to be fixed. And coming back to your question about can blockchain actually fix this, I think the answer is yes, because blockchain is about transparency. Blockchain is about democratization, letting everyone see what's going on and participate in the operations without having to Rely on someone allowing you to be part of that. So denying access.

Well, we spoke about KYC and for the viewers out there, KYC is know your customer. This is important information when you are under this heavily regulated industry by governments. So as we know with cryptocurrency that's not so regulated. Two questions. When the government steps in, how is that going to affect the folks that are in cryptocurrency right now? And there's regulations to how they activate and on the exchanges and the fiat exchanges, etc.

I mean, I think regulation in itself could bring positive change in practice. We still haven't seen seen that because the banks, which are probably the most heavily regulated type of companies in this industry, they have to allocate a significant percentage of their budget just to cover compliance costs. And who ends up paying for those costs? The users. So if you. The short answer to your question is if the cryptocurrency space gets regulated, it's going to get very expensive for everyone and it's going to be subjected to a lot of constraints and restrictions which I think is going to be very negative and destructive for the ecosystem. So I am a strong advocate of self regulation. So just regulate where you need to regulate, but don't try to step too much into every industry.

What do you feel about these government issued coins? You're talking about Russia, you're talking about China. These are heavily influential entities. How do you think that their presence in the cryptocurrency market will affect the others outside of that government regulate government issued coin?

I think it's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out. I don't have a strong view. I think my gut feeling is that it feels misguided to create a centralized cryptocurrency. That's kind of feels like a contradiction.

Right.

But I mean I can see why governments would want to sort of bring crypto into money issuance because it will give them more control, it will give them more visibility as to who is transacting with the currency, the amount and so on. So I can understand the rationale behind it, but I don't think it's going to bring real solutions.

You mentioned one of the main challenges. It's almost contradictory to what we're engaging with digital currency for. The anonymity, the ease of use, but the transparency of a secure transaction. And it seems as though the government wants to step in and regulate those sectors for their own benefit. Do you see it any other way besides them benefiting? Does it really look like they're benefiting the consumer or is it benefiting the government when they step in regulating cryptocurrency?

Well, I think, I mean, I'm going to use the example of Singapore. So Singapore is also looking into issuing their own national currency. And I think, I mean I, I'm sort of very bullish in Singapore. I've been in this country for five years and I absolutely love the way government approaches innovation and embraces entrepreneurs. And I believe that the way they see a centralized cryptocurrency is different from maybe the way China and Russia take it. And the way I see maybe a crypto Singapore dollar will be as a replacement for a cheque. So even though this country is hugely innovative, I think it has the highest percentage of cashless transact in the world. There's still millions of checks being issued and cashed every year and that is very expensive. And if you can get rid of checks and replace them with a crypto check, if you will, I would be very happy about that. I think that is a potentially a positive way of rolling out a centrally issued and controlled cryptocurrency.

We've had a lot of conversation about the finance industry and there's two things I'd like to ask you. One, what is the most disruptive, innovative, disruptive, positive, innovative company that you've seen that the show so far in the finance world, besides your company?

Quite a few companies that I come across for the first time in this event, which is kudos to the organizers in bringing such a wide range of companies. I can't remember the name of the company, so it's going to be unfair to them. But there's a small startup that's trying to create a digital bank based on cryptocurrency out of London.

Out of London.

They actually, I think based in the Valley in the US and they come into Singapore to mingle and connect with the local startups and learn from them. So I really like the approach they have. And if you can really build a strong foundation and create 100% crypto bank that focuses on transparency, on access and on democratizing services, I think that we're looking at potentially maybe a five to ten year journey that could bring significant positive impact to the entire community.

Superb. I appreciate you taking the time with us. Enjoy the rest of the show, we'll see you tomorrow. Stephen Chase signing off for Cointelegraphy.