Britain has become the latest country to join the digital currency trend. British authorities announced Monday they are exploring the possibility of creating a new digital currency that Treasury chief Rishi Sunak touted as “Britcoin.”

“We’re launching a new taskforce between the Treasury and the Bank of England to coordinate exploratory work on a potential central bank digital currency,” Sunak said at a fintech industry conference on Monday.

The Bank of England and the Treasury said Monday that they will work together to assess the benefits of a central bank digital currency, that will be used by households and businesses, and exists alongside cash and bank deposits, rather than replacing them. It is all coming at a time when cash payments are generally on the decline, partly as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

The authorities are yet to decide whether to introduce a digital version of the British pound. London said it would explore the objectives, use cases, opportunities and risks, involved before making the move. The Bank of England will also set up a unit within the institution dedicated to exploring a central bank digital currency.

The rise of cryptocurrency has inspired the move by many countries to create digital currencies, offering digital alternative to their fiat.

Digital currencies are being explored or even implemented in several countries now. China leads the way with digital yuan, while Japan has moved way into its own experiment. The European Union, Sweden and the United States have all expressed interest in creating digital currencies.

“The world is going the way of digital currencies and we have to find a place for them in the mainstream,” said Anne Boden, founder and chief executive of app-based Starling Bank.

Another factor driving Central Banks’ Digital Currencies (CBDCs) push is private stablecoin projects like Diem Association backed by Facebook and the token known as tether. To avoid the common cryptocurrency volatility, these coins have been pegged to some external reference such as the US dollar.

One of the benefits of a digital currency would be as a backup to card payments as cash payments continue to decline. It is expected that by the end of this decade, only one in 10 payments in the U.K. are to be made with traditional paper money. Proponents of digital currencies also think they can provide another way for people to make purchases online.

Currently, only the Bahamas has such a currency, but China is likely going to launch the digital yuan soon as its trials continue in several cities. Sweden has indicated it could have its own digital currency by 2026, while the European Central Bank has indicated an electronic euro might be created within four years.

The new British task force is part of a series of measures that Treasury chief Sunak hopes will help the U.K.’s financial technology sector.

“Our vision is for a more open, greener, and more technologically advanced financial services sector,” he told a fintech conference. “And if we can capture the extraordinary potential of technology, we’ll cement the U .K.’s position as the world’s preeminent financial center.”

The Bank of England said the Taskforce will be co-chaired by Deputy Governor for Financial Stability, Jon Cunliffe, and HM Treasury’s Director General of Financial Services, Katherine Braddick. The aim is to work with newly created forums and units to develop synergy with other UK and international authorities, and also engage stakeholders and gather input on all technology aspects of CBDC from a diverse cross-section of expertise and perspective.

In junior secondary, the Integrated Science teacher introduced us to mechanical advantage. Mechanical advantage (MA) is your load  (your resistance force) divided by effort (your effort force) This equation is the heart of all simple machines. That mechanical advantage is linked to another  property called Velocity Ratio (VR) which is determined by dividing the distance moved by effort by the distance moved by load. In an ideal world, MA and VR should be equal for a 100% efficient system. That is how you get Efficiency = MA/VR *100%. Unfortunately, you have wear, tear and frictions.

Yes, FRICTIONS which are also in market systems. Frictions make it impossible for demand and supply to attain a perfect equilibrium point in markets, due to many factors including information asymmetry in markets. To overcome Frictions, we create companies, which go to fix them. Companies use inputs ( factors of production) to produce a force called Products  & Services. Great companies use less inputs to bring out great outputs (products & services). 

You can see, markets can be modelled under physics and that means what happens in markets can be largely predictable. Innovatively disruptive companies reshape the ordinance in markets, bringing orders of magnitude in the efficiency level of the translation of input to output. They create orthogonal paths, different from others and set a new basis of competition.

Join me and 140 global faculty as we explain the Mechanics of market systems at Tekedia Mini-MBA. The next edition begins June 7. It is 100%, self-paced and costs N50,000 or $140. Register today.

Mechanics is the machinery or working parts of something. Yes, motion and forces producing motion. In mechanics of markets, you understand how markets work. You master the forces and motions in markets, looking at demand and supply. You see the momentum in markets through the translation of mass and velocity into scale and execution vision. We make business physics – and that is a good thing. JOIN US.

Exfida helps you manage sales, grow revenue, track activities that are critical to the delivery of your services to customers. It is a very new company which has been adding new customers. It has operations in Lagos (Nigeria) and Melbourne (Australia). So, we selected it to help our members to lead a session on “How To Launch A New Company” for Tekedia Mini-MBA Live. This is part of our Execution Phase where we are bringing companies to share experiences to our Learners.

Besides being new, Exfida also has another attribute – it is a great new business out of an existing one. So, Exfida provides a thesis for starting new, and even when inside a bigger firm. Zoom link in the Board.

Tue, April 20 | 11am – 12 noon WAT | How To Launch A New Company – Exfida Team

Europe’s finest football teams want to have their own parties. That would help them keep most of the money they make for European football. Yes, If  Real Madrid FC plays with FC Porto, most people are watching because of Real Madrid. However, at the end, Real Madrid may not capture huge value when the revenue is shared. But that spirit of allowing the weak to join that party has kept the game going for ages. Unfortunately, some bankers in New York have figured out a way: have a totally different party that is super-invitation-only and ensure that only the BIG boys could attend!

JP Morgan Chase bankers have American blood: there are no Silver or Bronze medals in most of their competitions. Either you are #1 (gold) or you go home empty handed. NBA, NFL, Hockey league, etc do not recognize runners-up with any public medal. Simply, America does not believe in coming second.

If you export that to the European football, you will get what the bank is saying: why get Rangers of Scotland  to join the Champions League when it has no chance of winning. Yes, it is better to allow the few teams which have won 80% of the last 20 trophies to compete if the ultimate goal is to win the trophy.

In the past, it was the weak teams they were making a case that they would pull out of the unity league. Many of them had complained that limited resources would never help them compete and win anything. In other words, three players in Real Madrid could buy a whole whole team within the qualifying rounds of some Champion League games. But here, the big boys are the ones pulling out, losing patience for sharing their goodies with the underperformers.

But no matter what – European football needs a draft system to improve competition in the game, and reduce the impacts of dominant teams. In the US, with a draft system, talent becomes distributed, making the game more competitive. If you check the NFL, the American football, you can see that most teams have won the trophies. That is possible because the NFL has drafts which inject the best talent to low performing teams to help calibrate out the outperformers. With that, a bad team can over time become better. That contrasts to what we have in Europe where you do not need any permutation to know the league contenders.

The best-known type of draft is the entry draft, which is used to allocate players who have recently become eligible to play in a league. Depending on the sport, the players may come from college, high school or junior teams, or teams in other countries. An entry draft is intended to prevent expensive bidding wars for young talent and to ensure that no one team can sign contracts with all of the best young players and make the league uncompetitive. To encourage parity, teams that do poorly in the previous season usually get to choose first in the postseason draft, sometimes with a “lottery” factor to discourage teams from deliberately losing.

People, this is the real SuperExit which may cause more pains for many in Europe than Brexit.

The Guardian has uncovered an unpublished European Super League document in the hidden code of its new website which seeks to justify the controversial breakaway by saying it will give fans “what they want”.

In comments that will raise eyebrows, it also claims the breakaway will offer “a sustainable and competitive environment for the whole football pyramid” – by providing more than three times the level of solidarity payments to smaller clubs than currently exist.

[…]

UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin has strongly condemned “disgraceful” proposals for a new European Super League as a “spit in the face of all football lovers”.

“We are all united against this nonsense of a project … The players that will play in the closed league will be banned from playing in the World Cup and Euros,” says UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin.

Ceferin: “Players who play in the closed league will be banned from participating in the World Cup and the European Championship. They won’t be able to play for their national team.”