Keynote address by Piero Cipollone, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at the 24th Annual Symposium on “Building the Financial System of the 21st Century: an Agenda for Europe and the United States”, hosted by the Harvard Law School and the Program on International Financial Systems

Washington DC, 15 April 2026

Today I will discuss the role of technology in the future of finance.^[1] I will seek to outline the conditions needed for technological innovations to genuinely enhance the economic efficiency of the financial system, focusing on tokenisation and distributed ledger technology (DLT) as a case in point.

Financial innovation should help capital find its most productive use and risk find its best owner at the lowest possible cost. These efficiency criteria have been used to justify and judge every major wave of innovation in modern finance, from the development of derivatives markets to electronic trading and dematerialisation. The distributional effects of innovation…