The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has issued a document to define a regulatory framework. And for good reason, the increasingly predominant place taken by bigtech in financial services around the world entails a risk according to the bank of central banks.

By Charles Cuvelliez, Ecole Polytechnique de Bruxelles, University of Brussels, and Jean-Jacques Quisquater, Ecole Polytechnique de Louvain, University of Louvain and MIT, the document was published on August 2, 2021. There is an urgent need to frame bigtechs and their future (inevitable) position in financial services. This is already the case in China where Alibaba (via Alipay) and Tencent occupy more than 90% of the market share in mobile payments. We already see bigtechs active in loans to individuals and small businesses, not to mention insurance and wealth management. What the BRI fears is a (re)fragmentation of means of payment and financial services in the end: each bigtech has its own proposal in this area, if possible within its ecosystem and its platform.