After paving the way for innovation in digital currencies at the Bank of England (BoE), Mark Carney officially serves on the Board of Directors of Stripe – a company dedicated to building new trading solutions for the internet.
Stripe introduced Carney as a board member on Sunday, joining Christa Davies, Diane Greene, Jonathan Chadwick, Sir Michael Moritz, and Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison. The US digital payments company says it will benefit from Carney’s “extensive experience with global financial systems and governance,” particularly as it introduces new climate change efforts.
“The nature of commerce has changed in the last decade,” said Carney. “Stripe led the way in enabling this new digital economy, delivering innovative and resilient global payment solutions for businesses large and small.”
He continued:
“I look forward to helping Stripe build the global infrastructure that enables the Internet to become the engine of strong and inclusive economic growth in the years to come.”
Stripe was founded in 2011 and markets itself as a complete payment processing platform for e-commerce and other forms of online business. The company first looked at Bitcoin (BTC) in 2014 before launching BTC payments the following year. However, Stripe would end BTC functionality in 2018 due to high fees and slow confirmation times. In October 2019, Stripe also gave up the Facebook-supported Libra project, which has since been renamed Diem.
Although Stripe has given up on Bitcoin payments, for the time being, co-founder John Collison has expressed a positive outlook on the future of cryptocurrencies, especially in emerging markets where payment systems are still evolving.
Carney was also positive about digital assets, especially those backed by central banks. At the 2019 Jackson Hole Symposium, Carney envisioned a future in which a central bank digital currency (CBDC) could replace the US dollar as the global reserve currency.
“It is an open question whether such a new synthetic hegemonic currency can best be provided by the public sector, possibly via a central bank digital currency network,” he said at the time.
Carney is almost a year away from serving as BoE governor. During his seven-year tenure, the central bank grappled with the economic consequences of Brexit and the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
