Martha Miller and Todd Fox on the Future of Payments and Financial Innovation

Todd Fox · VisaBullish

Consortium-governed OpenUSD fits the stablecoin era: GENIUS Act compliant and backed by US dollars and high-quality liquid assets.

Todd sees the OpenUSD consortium as a governance model that suits stablecoins, much as Visa and SWIFT were collectively owned by their participants. He contrasts it with Libra on two points. First, OpenUSD is dollar-denominated and will comply with the GENIUS Act, with reserves of high-quality liquid assets spelled out in regulation. Libra's basket-of-currencies or possibly non-fiat backing was too murky for central banks. Second, Libra's consortium included firms with large user bases, which raised fears of systemic risk before its rules were settled. Todd presents OpenUSD as the more regulator-ready design, though he frames this as a playbook comparison rather than a formal price call.

“It's right there in the name. It's the US dollar... So this is something that will be compliant with the genius act that is backed by high quality liquid assets”at 30:31

Todd Fox · VisaBearish

Libra never got off the ground because its backing was murky and central banks feared systemic risk.

Todd argues Libra was more a white paper than a launched product. Its reserve backing was unclear: it was not definitely US dollars or high-quality liquid assets, and could have included a basket of currencies or non-fiat assets. Financial stability officials then pressed the brakes. Because the consortium included firms with large user bases, there was a fear the token could become systemic before its governance and reserves were worked out. Todd presents this as a hard lesson that shaped later stablecoin regulation, and as the reason Libra failed to launch.

“Libra was kind of a white paper. Some companies signed some NDAs.”at 30:55

Martha Legg Miller · Fidelity Investments

Consortium value soars when a stablecoin's value comes from interoperability, as Zelle and Acoya show.

Martha declines to forecast OpenUSD directly and reframes the question: what is the value proposition of a consortium? Where much of the value comes from interoperability, which she says is the core question for stablecoins, consortium value rises. She cites Zelle, whose purpose was moving money between banks, where individual institutions building proprietary, poorly maintained systems made less sense than a shared consortium. She also cites Acoya, an API-backing consortium. Her point is that the best idea does not always sit with one institution, so a shared body can be better placed to solve the problem.

“If the value comes from interoperability, then consortium value skyrockets, and there's lots of examples of this.”at 34:11

David Beckworth · Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Stablecoins are not yet truly money because the legal architecture lags the technology.

Beckworth cites a paper on stablecoins. He says it showed that despite the technical innovations, the legal architecture does not yet make stablecoins truly like money in many dimensions. He raises the constraints this creates for the vision of 24/7 clearing, atomic settlement and programmable smart-contract ledgers, asking whether legal frictions will prevent that future.

“I learned a lot from it because it showed that despite all the technical innovations, the legal architecture is not there to make it truly like money, [in] many dimensions.”at 45:05

Martha Legg Miller · Fidelity Investments

Tokenising equities may add little value given markets already trade efficiently, though 24x trading is uncertain.

Miller questions the value proposition of tokenised equities, since trading is already hyper-efficient, and calls the benefit unclear. She says 24-hour trading might have some value, but it raises the question of whether systems can monitor markets around the clock. She points to the trading pauses that act as backstops, letting firms fix problems before trading reopens. She says these challenges are solvable but involve trade-offs.

“You think about everything from tokenizing equities and what's the value proposition if it's already hyper efficient in terms of trading? Unclear. There might be some. 24x trading... there are some really nice backstops that happen when things pause.”at 50:30

Todd Fox · Visa

In payments, governing rules and liability matter more than the underlying rails or database technology.

Moving money from point A to point B is the simple part. The hard part is defining which rights, rules and privileges attach to the money in transit so both sides of a transaction can trust it. Fox argues that the technology stack behind a Visa card has been replaced several times since 1958 and will keep changing, so whether it runs on a mainframe or a blockchain matters less than the governance attached to it.

“The simplest thing in payments is to move money from point A to point B. The hardest thing is to figure out what rights, rules, and privileges attach to that money as it's moving... That has a lot to do with rules and not as much as people may think to do with rails.”at 47:46

Todd Fox · Visa

Agentic AI will force new payments rules, while some existing rules extend and some become irrelevant.

Fox says the move to agentic AI is a new paradigm that will require some entirely new rules. Existing practices will split three ways: some will work well as-is, some will need to expand, and some will become irrelevant. The hard part is writing the legal framework so that when something goes wrong, it is clear who is liable. He ties this to geopolitical fragmentation and new threat vectors.

“Some of the stuff that we're already doing probably works well as we move into agentic AI. Some of it will need to expand. Some of it probably becomes irrelevant... The art is putting the right legal framework in place so that when things go wrong, you know who has liability.”at 48:50

Todd Fox · Visa

AI-enabled fraud is growing, so stopping it will require AI innovation, not standing still.

Fox argues the threat environment is worsening because malicious actors, cybercriminals, hackers and scammers can now use AI. Deploying new technology without safeguards is not enough. He concludes that defending against AI-enabled fraud sometimes requires innovation in AI itself, and that institutions must keep an innovator's-dilemma mindset rather than rely on old defenses.

“The world's getting more and more scary... But sometimes it really takes innovation in AI to stop AI enabled fraud. So you can't just sit still and expect the good old days to last forever.”at 49:44

Martha Legg Miller · Fidelity Investments

SEC's electronic-delivery rules should be technology-neutral rather than hard-coded to email.

Miller praises the SEC proposal to make electronic delivery the default for investor information. She argues that defining an 'electronic address' as email would be the wrong choice, because it would force rule rewrites every time communication changes. She notes the move from passwords to text codes to passkeys and says rules should allow secure, authenticated channels without tying them to SMS, email or SMTP.

“The obvious thing, if you're going to use today's technology, is to try to define email. That is, I think, the wrong thing because we don't need a world in which we need to change the rule book every single time a new way of communicating comes along.”at 52:17