The future financial system would require digital money, digital assets, regulated identity, institutional custody and interoperable settlement. The disagreements concerned governance, sequencing and control, not the direction itself.

The discussion eventually moved from technology to monetary transmission, and that was the point at which the meeting became considerably more serious.

One presentation dealt with the effect of sustained higher financing costs on household and corporate balance sheets. The central point was simple enough. Central banks would not need to keep policy rates extraordinarily high forever. Once higher yields became embedded across the sovereign curve, the market itself would continue transmitting restrictive conditions through mortgages, corporate refinancing, commercial property, asset valuations and collateral requirements.

Households would not experience monetary tightening through central bank speeches. They would experience it when mortgages reset. They would experience it when refinancing previously obtained at 2 percent suddenly cost 6 percent. Disposable income would contract. Savings would be drawn down. Securities would be sold. Investment properties would be rationalized. The most heavily leveraged owners would eventually surrender assets.

On the other side of those transactions would sit capital with very different funding characteristics. Pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign capital, private credit vehicles, property funds and large asset managers would be better positioned to endure the same environment. Over time, ownership would become more institutional.

That observation led naturally to securitization.

For my generation of bankers, securitization was one of the defining transformations of modern finance. A mortgage that once existed as a simple relationship between a household and its local bank became something entirely different. Mortgages were standardized, pooled and transformed into securities that could be distributed throughout the world. The homeowner continued making the same monthly payment, while the economic interest in that payment might ultimately sit inside portfolios in New York, London, Frankfurt or Tokyo.

Tokenization was discussed as the next stage of that evolution.

The difference was that tokenization would reach further than credit. It would affect ownership itself. Property interests would become programmable. Mortgages would become digital credit instruments. Rental income would become machine readable cash flow. Collateral could be monitored continuously. Economic ownership could be divided across jurisdictions while settlement occurred almost immediately.

Yet tokenization solved only half the problem. Every financial transaction requires an asset and a means of payment. Tokenized securities and real world assets would provide the asset side. Stablecoins, tokenized commercial bank deposits and eventually forms of central bank digital money would provide the cash side.

Once that framework was accepted, the remainder followed naturally. Digital identity. Verifiable credentials. KYC. Sanctions controls. Institutional custody. Programmable compliance. Liquidity management. Interoperability. What had previously looked like a collection of unrelated technological experiments began to resemble a coherent financial architecture.

It was at this point, that Ripple became particularly interesting.

Not Ripple as a cryptocurrency company. Ripple as financial infrastructure.

That distinction was important then, and I believe it remains important now.

The XRP Ledger was considered in the context of moving tokenized value across otherwise fragmented systems. XRP itself was discussed more narrowly as a potential source of neutral bridge liquidity where two assets lacked an efficient direct market. The institutional proposition was never that XRP would replace the dollar, euro, yen or sterling. No serious central banker in the room was interested in surrendering monetary sovereignty.

The proposition was subtler.