In this episode of Looking Back Looking Forward: Building Better Payment Systems, Professor Douglas Arner discusses the progression of electronic payments, since its acceleration towards social development from the last hundred years, and recently towards the impact COVID-19 on global economies. The use of such payments co-developed throughout human history, from the telegraph to the automated teller machine (ATM) and, most notably, to the establishment of decentralised ledger technology (blockchain, bitcoin, etc.). Such innovative steps have encouraged the competition to raise the bar, such as DCEP, the world's first major currency central-bank digital currency in response to a more decentralised payment system.

The future role of electronic payments and its significance towards the coming years are highlighted in a new paper:

Sovereign Digital Currencies: Reshaping the Design of Money and Payments Systems by Ross P. Buckley, Douglas W. Arner, Dirk A. Zetzsche, Anton N. Didenko, Lucien van Romburg :: SSRN