European Commission - Speech [Check Against Delivery] Commissioner Albuquerque Speech at the 24th Annual Harvard Symposium Washington, DC, 15 April 2026 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is a pleasure to be back in Washington. In my discussions with both industry leaders and my counterparts in the US public sector , one theme has consistently emerged: the fundamental transformation of the financial sector's digi...
European Commission - Speech [Check Against Delivery] Commissioner Albuquerque Speech at the 24th Annual Harvard Symposium Washington, DC, 15 April 2026 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is a pleasure to be back in Washington. In my discussions with both industry leaders and my counterparts in the US public sector , one theme has consistently emerged: the fundamental transformation of the financial sector's digital architecture and the impacts of digital in everything we do. It is also a recurring theme of this conference. In fact, no matter where I travel as European Commissioner, this is no longer a future priority - it is already unfolding in real time. Among policymakers, there is a clear sense of cautious optimism, and I share it. This has been high on the European Commission's agenda, and we are now in the next great growth phase of the global financial system. We are no longer in the exploration stage. We are now well into implementation. Today, my intention is not to try and rehearse the reasons why these technologies are changing our financial sector – as industry participants, you know this better than anyone else. Today, I want to give you my perspective, as an EU policymaker, of the opportunities in front of us. While in the European Commission we are taking a much broader view to digitalisation of the financial sector, including around the data space, today I will look specifically at tokenisation and AI, and how we, as policymakers, can build a system that is more efficient but also, simpler, faster, safer, and more transparent. On the plane to DC, I was remembering how fast and how far we have come in term of our digital advancements in recent history. And my memory was cast back to the pre-Smart Phones analogue world, where travelling didn't begin at the airport, but days before at the bank or foreign exchange desk - exchanging paper for paper. I trust that most of you in the room today remember this ritual well. When I travel, I don't even think about currency exchange – my digital wallet and my payment cards simply woke up in a new jurisdiction and adapted. This is the simplicity that is expected these days, and this is the scale of the transition I believe is before us. Six years ago, the EU published its first Digital Finance Strategy. In it, we made a decisive choice to prioritise innovation, while also addressing its potential risks. Alongside the pioneering framework for crypto-assets, known as MiCA, we also introduced a pilot for the use of distributed ledger technology in financial market infrastructures. We took a proactive sandbox approach to DLT, recognising the potential that this technology could bring to financial services, while ensuring we had the tools to de-risk the space in real-time. Tokenisation has the potential to make our capital markets deeper, more liquid, and more globally competitive. Innovation is often seen as a winner-takes-all race, where first place takes all the spoils, and second is a lost venture. However, when the benefits of innovation are dispersed beyond pure corporate profit – the winners table grows beyond a table for one. This is the case with tokenisation. It makes finance more accessible, widening the ‘inner circle' to a much broader group, giving access with little to no entry costs. It's the difference between waiting five days for a cross-border transfer to reach a family member living outside the EU and having it happen in seconds. It's about removing the hidden fees and the manual delays that have essentially acted as a tax on people's time and money for decades. Our DLT pilot was one of the first of its kind in the world, and while it allowed for experimentation, we felt like we could do even more in this area. In December, we presented a package to advance the integration of our capital markets in the European Union. As part of this, we proposed a strengthened DLT pilot, expanding its scale, broadening its scope and increasing its flexibility to support wider uptake across the European Union. The December package proposes targeted adjustments to our regulatory framework, including amendments to the DLT Pilot Regime to recalibrate existing limits, increase proportionality and flexibility, and provide legal certainty. These changes are designed to support the adoption of new technologies in the financial sector, including tokenisation. This will enable further experimentation and be complemented by a modernised post-trade framework better suited to accommodate new technologies. We are ensuring that where innovation can make our capital markets more efficient, our rules do not stand in the way. We are taking the same approach with AI. We have to remember that while AI feels omnipresent, we must recognise that we are still in the early chapters of this transformation. It is already permeating every corner of every industry, and while its impact is visible, we have not seen its full potential. Six years ago, when we first approached the topic of digitalisation in finance, agentic AI was not a mainstream concept . Since then, AI evolved beyond analysis — it is now capable of acting. This shift changes the game for financial services. We are moving from a world where an algorithm flags a suspicious transaction, to a world where AI agents can autonomously manage liquidity, rebalance portfolios in milliseconds, and execute complex smart contracts without a human hand on the tiller. This is not a mere step forward. This is not an adjustment. It is a leap. AI is already a part of our capital markets – industry players in the room today will attest to that. You've invested significant amounts in AI and have included it in your strategies for growth in the coming years. AI reduces complexity, making financial services more intuitive, more accessible, and more responsive to individual and corporate needs. It has the potential to widen access to financial products for underserved groups, reduce barriers linked to language or financial literacy, and create more inclusive systems that better reflect the diversity of our societies. At the same time, AI has the potential to strengthen trust in the system. It enhances fraud detection and prevention capabilities, identifies risks earlier, and supports more resilient operations for firms of all sizes. For businesses, this means lower costs and smarter decision-making; for consumers, it means safer, more personalised, and more reliable financial services. In this sense, AI has the power to help build a more secure, inclusive, and efficient financial ecosystem. The pace of acceleration is increasing and we are only a few years into this technology – there is much more to come, and the end of the story will be based on the benefits it brings, and to whom. AI in finance depends fundamentally on access to large, high-quality and diverse datasets. Without this, its development in Europe will remain limited and fragmented. This is why open finance is essential: it enables secure, consent-based data sharing, giving firms the scale of data needed to develop and deploy effective AI solutions. Our EU FiDA proposal goes in that direction, although it faces criticism from incumbents. At the same time, open finance ensures a trusted framework, with strong safeguards on privacy, security and accountability. In this way, open finance is not only supporting innovation, it is a necessary condition for developing competitive and trustworthy AI in Europe's financial sector. Both tokenisation and AI have significant potential to reshape our markets – especially when taken together. Tokenisation provides real-time, programmable and interoperable infrastructure, and AI brings the capacity to operate it dynamically and at scale, making use of all the data available. We have an opportunity to redesign how our financial markets work, making them more accessible, efficient and resilient for the future. However, while in Europe we are working to ensure that our rules do not hinder innovation, we also have a responsibility as policymakers to safeguard financial stability, market integrity and investor protection. The foundation of the global system is trust, and trust is an integral prerequisite for innovation to be taken up at scale. As the financial system evolves and transforms, international coordination will be even more crucial. These markets are global and operate in real time, meaning that fragmentation across jurisdictions risks stifling innovation and limiting its full potential. It also creates the risk of gaps in our regulatory approaches, leading to legal uncertainty for businesses and opening the door to regulatory arbitrage. Strong coordination is therefore the most effective way to achieve scale, and we look forward to working closely with our international partners to deliver on this. I now want to thank you and wish you a productive day of discussions ahead. SPEECH/26/821
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