Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani on Friday said he is a big believer in blockchain technology, and it is very important for a trust-based, equitable society.
“Blockchain is a technology I believe in and it’s different from cryptocurrency,” Mr. Ambani said at the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA)’s InFinity Forum. “It is a very important framework for just and trust-based transaction and trust-based society, which is a prerequisite for all of us.”
Mr. Ambani said both data and digital infrastructure were strategically important for India and every other nation in the world, and every country had the right to build and protect this strategic digital infrastructure. He called for having a uniform global standard so that cross-border transactions, collaborations and partnerships were not hampered.
“I believe, collectively, as a human race, we can progress much more by being interconnected and interdependent…India can lead the way to a uniform UPI or a uniform payment interface,” he noted.
Mr. Ambani added that every citizen’s right to privacy had to be safeguarded, and therefore “we have to work to have the right policies and the right regulatory framework to balance the imperatives of creating next generation infrastructure, harmonising and integrating it with the rest of the world and regulating in a way that we don’t stifle innovation but protect the end user and all the citizens of the country and the world.”
Replying to a query on what will drive the growth of fintech, the RIL chairman said finance was at the heart of everything and “we have not digitised finance to its full potential. We are in very early stages of sporadic digitisation. And the opportunity, as I see all these technologies emerging, is the opportunity to make sure that we actually adopt a decentralised model of finance.”
He added, “We have evolved over the last 100 years in organised finance through a very centralised model. I still believe that there will be a centralised government and central bank policy, but there will be a path to very decentralised technological solutions where finance will be enabled and available to everybody.”
