A three-way fight to shape the future of digital finance has begun：Regulators must preserve its potential while guarding against risk
一场塑造数字金融未来的三方斗争已经开始：监管必须在防范风险的同时维持其发展潜力
Finance is becoming ever less the domain of sharp-suited bankers and credit-card executives. Instead, a ragtag cast of characters is overseeing an explosion of innovation that seeks to cut out the incumbents altogether. From established tech firms and fintech startups on America’s west coast to developers of various “decentralised-finance” (DeFi) applications, they are jostling to reshape digital finance. In 2022 regulators must respond and start setting out their stalls.
金融渐渐不再是西装革履的银行家和玩转信用卡的高管的领地。取而代之的是，一群乌合之众正在密切关注着试图淘汰现有玩家的创新大爆发。从美国西海岸的成熟科技公司和金融科技初创公司到各种「去中心化金融」（DeFi）应用的开发者，他们都在争抢着重塑数字金融。2022 年，监管者必须做出回应，并开始行动起来。
This digital revolution encompasses three broad trends. One is the effort to offer an ever-widening range of financial products on a single platform. Facebook’s new digital wallet could make inroads. Banks, payment providers and bigger fintechs will continue to gobble up startups, with the aim of offering customers such a breadth of services that they will use a single platform for everything.
这场数字革命包括三个主要趋势。一是在一个平台上尝试提供日益丰富的金融产品。Facebook 的新型数字钱包可能会占领市场。银行、支付平台和更大的金融科技公司将继续吞并初创公司，目标是给消费者提供普遍的服务，使得他们只用一个平台就能做所有事情。
The second trend is the nascent attempt to decentralise finance. Developers are building all sorts of financial applications on blockchains, which ensure security and trust without the need for any intermediaries. Novel assets of all kinds associated with the DeFi world, such as non-fungible tokens (nfts) and other crypto-tokens, will continue to proliferate. Third, central banks, usually bastions of conservatism, are also breaking new ground. As more economic activity moves online and physical cash falls out of favour, many are on the path to introducing digital currencies of their own.
第二个趋势是对于去中心化金融的新尝试。开发者正在区块链上搭建各种金融应用，它们不需要任何中介就能保证安全性和信任。与 DeFi 世界有所关联的各种新奇资产，诸如非同质化代币（nfts）和其他加密代币，将继续大量涌现。第三个趋势，通常被视为保守主义堡垒的央行，也在开辟新天地。随着越来越多的经济活动迁移到线上以及实体货币的失宠，许多央行正在推行自己的数字货币。
There is plenty of action to come in 2022. The People’s Bank of China will launch its e-yuan more widely; central banks from Jamaica and Japan to Thailand and Turkey will conduct various tests and pilots. Big rich countries will come a step closer to testing their own digital currencies. Innovation will continue in the private sector, too. New ideas have been well funded: venture capitalists poured nearly $60 bn into financial-technology startups in the first half of 2021. More than a hundred DeFi applications are in the works.
2022 年即将迎来一系列行动。中国央行将会在更广的范围内发行数字人民币；从牙买加、日本到泰国、土耳其，这些国家的央行将会进行各种测试和试点。富裕大国将会进一步测试他们自己的数字货币。在私营行业，创新也将继续。新想法获得了很好的投资：在 2021 年上半年，风投机构给金融科技初创企业投资了近 600 亿美元。目前有超过 100 个 DeFi 应用正在开发中。
Such fast-paced, exhilarating changes provide a stark contrast with retail finance of old, with its sleepy way of doing business, exorbitant fees and dire customer service. There is much to like about the new finance. For customers it should mean a system that uses technology to serve their needs better and at lower cost. Financial inclusion is a problem even in the rich world: one in five Americans were either unbanked or underbanked in 2018. Small firms regularly struggle to access finance.
如此迅速、令人兴奋的改变与传统零售金融形成了鲜明对比，它们的经营方式令人昏昏欲睡，手续费过高，客户服务糟糕。新金融有太多让人喜欢的点。对客户来说，它意味着一个利用科技以更低成本满足客户需求的系统。金融普惠即使在富裕国度里也是一个问题：五分之一的美国人没有银行账户或者不依赖银行服务。小公司通常很难获得融资。
Competition should also erode the fat margins of the incumbents (Visa and Mastercard make gross margins of 65-80%). Transferring money across borders, such as through remittances from rich countries to poor ones, is still too expensive. And as people conduct more of their lives online, it makes sense for finance to become not just more digital, but also better embedded within other digital activities, such as entertainment and shopping.
竞争也会侵蚀现有巨头的丰厚利润（Visa 和 Mastercard 的毛利率为 65% - 80%）。跨境转账，比如从富国向穷国汇款，仍然很贵。随着人们将更多的生活转移到线上，很明显，金融不仅要变得更加数字化，同时也要更好地嵌入其他数字化活动，如娱乐和购物。
Realising this promise, however, requires warding off the threats that fast change also brings. Take the risks to investors. A few new fintech ideas may take off. Others will fizzle out, leaving investors with losses. The hordes of crypto-speculators could meet a similar fate. Paying $1.3 m for an nft of a picture of a rock, as someone did in August 2021, may turn out not to have been a canny investment. For customers, the risk is that financial platforms’ greater access to data might invite misuse of market power. Novel financial products could be more vulnerable to scams—and in a decentralised world it will not be clear how and where to seek recourse.
要实现这种愿景，当然也需要避免快速变化同时带来的危险。投资者需要承担风险。少数金融科技的新创想可能迅速走向成功。其他的大部分则终成泡影，让投资者蒙受损失。加密货币的投机者们可能会遭遇类似的命运。2021 年 8 月有人花 130 万美元购买了一幅画着石头的 NFT，最后可能被证明这不是一项明智的投资。对许多用户来说，风险在于金融平台掌握着大量数据，这可能会导致其对市场力量的滥用。新奇的金融产品往往更加脆弱，以致于骗局横行，在去中心化的世界里很难清楚地知道如何或在哪里寻求追索权。
It thus falls to regulators to preserve the potential, while guarding against the risks. As the boundary between financial firms and tech companies blurs further, and the value of amassing customer data increases, protecting privacy and security will be paramount. But that must be done without compromising the necessary anti-money-laundering checks. This calculation will apply as much to central banks’ digital currencies as to private financial services. (China’s trial of its e-currency, sadly, will offer little guidance on the matter, given the government’s preference for control over privacy.)
在防范这些风险的同时，维持新金融的潜力，责任就此落到了监管机构的肩上。随着金融公司和科技公司之间的边界日渐模糊，积累用户数据的价值日益增加，保护隐私和安全将成为最重要的事。但这些措施必须不能影响必要的反洗钱审查。这些计算将尽可能应用到央行数字货币和私人金融服务中去。（遗憾的是，鉴于政府更倾向于控制隐私，中国数字人民币的试点在这件事上提供不了什么指导。）
Trickier still will be working out how to bring DeFi into regulators’ purview. It may be just as well that Gary Gensler, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, America’s main financial watchdog, once taught a class on blockchain technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
更棘手的是，如何将 DeFi 纳入监管的范围。美国主要的金融监管机构——证券交易委员会的主席 Gary Gensler，曾经在麻省理工教过一门区块链技术的课程，这或许也无妨。
Just as their financial promise could grow, $2.5 trn-worth of crypto-assets may start to carry risks for the wider financial system. Yet the industry retains an almost ideological resistance to regulation, and its lobbying clout is growing. Advocates of digital finance have been laying out their plans for the future of the industry. Now the time has come for regulators to explain how they see it.
随着他们金融愿景的增长，2.5 万亿价值的加密货币资产可能开始给更广泛的金融系统带来风险。然而，这个行业仍然对监管保有意识形态上的抵触，他们的游说势力也在不断扩大。数字金融的拥护者们已经规划好了行业未来的发展计划。现在该轮到监管者来阐释他们所看到的一切了。
词语/短语：
a cast of characters 一组角色
cut out 删除、裁剪、排除
set out one’s stall 采取行动以示决心
make inroad into/on sth. 侵占、削弱、消耗某事物
gobble sth. up 吞并，消耗掉某物
fall/go out of favour 失宠
pour sth. into sth. 向...投入大量金钱
in the works 在筹划，酝酿中
stark contrast 鲜明对比
underbanked 拥有银行账户但更多使用替代性金融服务而非使用信用卡、信用贷等银行服务
ward off 防止，避免，抵御（危险、疾病、攻击等）
take off 突然大受欢迎，迅速流行
fizzle out 虎头蛇尾
lay sth. out 铺开，展开；布置，筹划，安排，设计
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