After paving the way for digital currency innovation at the Bank of England, or BoE, Mark Carney officially joined the board of directors at Stripe – a company committed to building new trading solutions for the Internet.
Stripe nominated Carney as board member on Sunday, where he, along with Christa Davies, Diane Greene, Jonathan Chadwick, Sir Michael Moritz and Stripe, are co-founders Patrick and John Collison. The US digital payments company says it will benefit from Carney’s ‘extensive experience of global financial systems and management’, especially as it leverages new climate efforts.
“The nature of the trade has changed over the last decade,” Carney said. “Stripe has been at the forefront of enabling this new digital economy and providing innovative and resilient global payment solutions to businesses large and small.”
He continues:
“I look forward to supporting Stripe in the years to come as they build the global infrastructure that enables the Internet to become the driving force for strong and inclusive economic growth.”
Founded in 2011, Stripe markets itself as a complete payment processing platform for e-commerce and other types of online businesses. The company only plunged into Bitcoin (BTC) in 2014 before launching BTC payments the following year. However, Stripe will eventually drop BTC functionality in 2018 due to high fees and slow confirmation times. In October 2019, Stripe also dropped the Facebook-backed Libra project, which has since been renamed Diem.
Although Stripe has given up on Bitcoin payments, co-founder John Collison has expressed a positive attitude towards the future of cryptocurrencies, especially in emerging markets where payment systems are still evolving.
Carney also expressed a favorable view on digital assets, especially those backed by central banks. At the 2019 Jackson Hole Symposium, Carney envisioned a future where a central bank’s digital currency, or CBDC, could replace the US dollar as a global reserve currency.
“It is an open question whether such a new Synthetic Hegemonic currency can best be provided by the public sector, perhaps through a central bank network of digital currencies,” he said at the time.
Carney is removed from his post as BoE governor for almost one year. During his seven-year tenure, the central bank tackled the economic consequences of Brexit and the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.