P2PFISY 2025 Opening Remarks

Buenos días, Good morning, everyone.
Señoras y señores, queridos colegas y amigos: ¡bienvenidos!

It is a special privilege to open this year’s Peer-to-Peer Financial Systems International Workshop in Uruguay, and to do so here in Montevideo, a city whose horizon looks both to the Río de la Plata and to the wider world. 

Today, we add a South American chapter to a journey that began a decade ago at the Deutsche Bundesbank, with the simple, stubborn idea that we must bring regulators, academics, and industry leaders into the same room to debate, test, and co-create the future of finance.

That mission remains our compass. 

Before anything else, let me thank our hosts and local partners for their leadership and warm hospitality: the Banco Central del Uruguay (BCU) and the Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y de Administración (FCEA) of the Universidad de la República.

We are grateful to Director Julio Sanguinetti and Acting Dean Prof. Carlos Bianchi, who welcomed us this morning, and to the many colleagues across both institutions who’ve worked to make this gathering possible. 

I also want to acknowledge the community of scholars, practitioners, public servants, entrepreneurs, and students who have traveled from across Latin America and beyond to join us. P2PFISY has become a place where ideas can be argued.

OUR TRADITION

Since that first edition in 2015, P2PFISY has stood for a simple premise: finance cannot be re-imagined from a single vantage point: It requires regulators who will listen, academics who will translate, engineers who will ship, and investors who will back solutions that are safe as well as bold.

Over the years, we have partnered with central banks and standard setters across Europe and North America, as well as leading universities and industry pioneers. 

That lineage is not about prestige; it is about method: 

• ask the hard questions, 
• test them publicly
• and refine. 

A question I posed in previous editions remains our north star:

How are technological developments reshaping financial intermediation—its efficiency, stability, inclusiveness, and governance?

We have never shied away from controversy: 

• The promise and limits of decentralisation; 
• The trade-offs between programmability and policy; 
• The tension between privacy and accountability; 
• The myth and the reality of ‘code is law.’ 

These themes are part of the P2PFISY DNA.

We have learned—again and again—that governance, law and market design decide whether the code creates value.

In Dubai last year with the Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority, we revisited long-standing debates on decentralization, programmability, and the mythologies of money—from Hayek to modern stablecoins—while acknowledging the gap between ideals and implementations. 

The lesson we took forward was humility and discipline: we must build systems that are accountable, auditable, inclusive, not merely innovative.

That spirit travels with us to Montevideo today.

WHY URUGUAY FOR P2PFISY?

Coming to Uruguay is a deliberate choice. 

1) A decade of inclusion policy that targeted cash frictions

Uruguay’s 2014 Law of Financial Inclusion—requiring electronic wage and social security payments and expanding choice of receiving institutions—was a pivotal, pro-competitive step that lifted digital use where it matters most: recurring payments to households. 

2) A digital-government leader by global standards

Uruguay is not ‘catching up.’ It is setting the pace. In the latest United Nations E-Government Survey (2024), Uruguay climbed from 35th to 25th globally, the top country in Latin America and the Caribbean, and second in the Americas only to the United States. 

The UN report itself highlights a uniquely regional solution for cross-border electronic signature validation as a model of practical digital public infrastructure. 

Uruguay is also a member of Digital Nations, the small club of the world’s most advanced digital governments. 

These are not vanity metrics. They are preconditions for scaling safe and inclusive digital finance: 

• verifiable identity
• reliable connectivity
• service standardization
• public-private cooperation.

3) Payment system modernization with measurable results

By looking at the BCU’s retail payments reports. By 2H-2024, the Índice de Pagos Electrónicos vs. Tradicionales (IPET) reached 77.4, meaning electronic means accounted for the clear majority of payment value—up from the prior semester. 

Under the BCU’s Hoja de Ruta 2023–2025, Uruguay also introduced Pago con Transferencias within the new Sistema de Pagos Rápidos ‘Toke’ in September 2024. This is not a pilot at the edge; it is a live national capability now listed by the World Bank FASTT initiative among the region’s instant-transfer systems. 

The impact has been visible in the velocity of instant transfers. In 1H-2024, Uruguay recorded more than 9 million instant interbank transfers, already surpassing the full-year 2023 total, with interbank transfer activity overall up double digits year-on-year. 

And the ambition is outward-facing. The BCU has publicly flagged cross-border interoperability with Brazil’s Pix for tourists, and signalled work to extend local acceptance to other neighbours’ account-to-account rails. 

4) High digital adoption levels across the population

Digital finance scales only where people are connected. Nearly 90% of Uruguay’s population used the internet at the start of 2024 (89.9%), and the country had 6.59 million mobile connections—192.6% of the total population—reflecting multi-SIM usage typical of mature markets. 

5) Prudent regulatory posture, open to innovation

Uruguay combines macro stability and regulatory prudence with openness to new rails. That posture shows in retail payment reforms, in digital identity and e-signature infrastructure (firma.gub.uy), and in the government’s engagement with global digital-policy networks.

6) An emerging fintech hub with a regional footprint

Uruguay’s fintech ecosystem is compact and outward-looking, with success stories in payments, infrastructure, and capital markets and a growing open banking agenda. At the regional level, LAC fintechs quadrupled to 3,069 (2017–2023), underscoring why South America is a natural laboratory for instant payments, tokenization pilots, and digital finance infrastructure. The market, which was valued at USD 13.14 billion in 2024, is projected to surge to nearly USD 50 billion by 2033, demonstrating a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.90%.

FINAL THOUGHTS

As we gather here in Montevideo, there’s a broader global dynamic unfolding. 

Currencies are no longer competing only on macroeconomic fundamentals, such as:

• interest rates
• inflation
• trade surpluses/deficit

but are increasingly competing also on 

• technological rails
• data integrity
• infrastructure
• network effects
• governance. 

I wrote a piece almost 2 years ago titled ‘The Struggle for Currency Supremacy.’

It reminds us that while the U.S. dollar remains ‘supreme,’ it is being challenged. 

The next front in monetary power is not only financial muscle, but the strength, credibility and resilience of digital infrastructure.

What does all this mean for South America—and for P2PFISY?

Infrastructure is not optional, it’s strategic.
If monetary power now depends significantly on technology—on payment rails, identity systems, data transmission, cryptographic attestation, ledger integrity—then countries that build robust, transparent, inclusive infrastructure are not just improving services; they are shaping their own monetary sovereignty. Uruguay’s investments in digital government, instant payments, identity infrastructure, etc., give it a stake in this emerging monetary order.

Diversity of monetary forms & competition create opportunity and urgency.
In my piece, I argue that stablecoins, digital assets, alternative rails, etc., complicate the picture of dollar dominance. That isn’t just a theoretical concern. For countries in South America, it means new financial architecture is knocking on the door—foreign stablecoins, possibly global blockchains, cross-border digital currency networks. 

These bring opportunity: 

• cheaper remittances
• greater financial inclusion
• more innovation. 

They also bring risk: 

• regulatory arbitrage
• currency instability
• data and consumer protection concerns. 

P2PFISY is valuable precisely because it’s a forum to examine both opportunity and risk, in collaboration, not in isolation.

Technological infrastructure is the foundation of credible monetary sovereignty.
The credibility of currencies will increasingly depend on things like data integrity, network effects, resilience of software, regulatory oversight of technological layers—not just macro-policy. For South America, this means investing in secure, resilient rails; in identity systems with privacy and verifiability; in governance models that ensure transparency, auditability, and access. It means that central banks, regulators, and private firms need to work together not just on policy or finance, but on technical architecture.

Network effects and regional cooperation matter more than ever.
One country building good infrastructure helps itself; several cooperating regionally magnify the impact. If Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, and others can align on standards, rails, cross-border interoperability, then South America may not just adapt to shifts in monetary power—it may shape its own. P2PFISY’s role is to catalyze these connections. This is not merely about domestic innovation; it is about participating in an emerging multiplicity of monetary architectures.

Regulation, legitimacy, and trust become core currencies.
The strength of any digital asset or payment rail will depend not only on code, but on accountability, effective regulation, consumer protection, and public trust. In a context where technological failure, fraud, or opacity can rapidly erode legitimacy, countries that build trustworthy institutions—strong oversight, legal clarity, enforcement—will be better positioned. 

P2PFISY offers us not only a chance to learn from experiments in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and elsewhere—but to ask: what infrastructure do we need together, what rules of the road must we set together, so that our digital rails serve economic inclusion and sovereign determinations, not just global platforms and distant norms.

Because in the end, monetary power will depend less on who prints the most dollars, and more on who builds rails that people trust, on who ensures data flows securely, transparency is baked in, and financial innovation lifts the many rather than centralizing advantage.

I believe that the work we begin here over the next two days, grounded in data, policy, and collaboration, can help South America stake out a credible voice in this emerging monetary order

To conclude, let me express my gratitude to our Scientific Committee, our invited speakers, and to the many reviewers who helped curate the program. Our thanks again to BCU and FCEA for their partnership and hospitality, and to all of you for making time—some of you traveling very far—to be here. 

Muchas gracias y bienvenidos.