Alumni and guests are invited to join the Oxford and Cambridge Society of Singapore for a virtual fireside chat with Robert Wardrop: "The decentralisation of the global financial system: how well positioned is Singapore?"

Rapid technological innovation is decentralising the financial system (“DeFi”), with DeFi-based applications like cryptocurrencies emerging to challenge the status quo for incumbent intermediaries and governmental institutions. While Singapore has emerged as a leader in supporting fintech innovation, how well positioned is it relative to other nations in addressing both the opportunities and challenges stemming from structural changes enabled by DeFi?

Dr Wardrop is an economic sociologist interested in understanding how and why channels, instruments and systems of finance emerge outside the traditional financial system and how this impacts regulators, incumbent financial institutions and consumers. He was recently awarded the Sandra Dawson Research Impact Award for the Regulatory Genome Project, a public-private initiative creating an open-access information structure for machine-readable regulatory information, and is co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Technological Finance published by Palgrave Macmillan in October 2021.