The World is Changing, that Doesn’t Need to Be All Bad News

Anyone that knows me will know that I’ve never been comfortable saying “I told you so,” but the conversations last week in Davos really do speak to a lot of my thinking and work for the past 10 years; 2025 marked a real change in the geopolitical — and by extension, financial — landscape of the world.

Much of my work and many of my conversations over the last decade have been built on the premise that a shift toward a multipolar world was coming. Last year, it felt like that shift stopped being a projection and took shape. Davos in turn became a catalyst for those discussions. Mark Carney’s speech caught the headlines, but the same themes kept surfacing across different rooms and from very different voices.

Alongside were discussions, speeches and papers that discussed how the world might adapt in a practical way to accommodate this fast-moving landscape. What struck me most was how familiar many of these discussions sounded — topics I’ve spent thousands of hours on over the past decade. A clear shift away from the usual “apps to the rescue” conversation and more toward the infrastructure layer underneath them, which to me is where the real change will sit.

I have been arguing for many years that the question of whether “digital” or “banking” wins is the wrong argument and that like in the rest of human history tomorrow will be a mix of yesterday and today; Davos started to move the discussion into that arena. This not for the first time, but certainly with the most substantive and serious discussions to date around how banks and blockchains are not a parallel world or even competing systems; but two necessary functions that can and will form part of the same institutional layer.

As one Davos paper put it, “none of this happens without a functioning dialogue between banks and blockchains,” and that line captured the shift in tone across many of the conversations I heard. Digital rails were discussed less as innovation and more as something that might sit inside the machinery of trade, settlement, and capital markets. The question was much more aligned with my thinking on this, not whether these systems belong in formal finance, but how they would be governed once they did. The gradual shift into digital as an asset class has been being mooted for some time, not least by a number of Trump adjacent folks past and present – but much less so as a driver of infrastructure.

To date the innovation in the global south has come at the application layer, which has changed lives and had great impact, but it has largely taken the form of workarounds rather than structural change.

I had always taken the view that for the change to really bite it would not show up in products, platforms, or interfaces — but in the infrastructure layer, where value clears, where liquidity sits, where balance sheets can be built and importantly where visibility and authority can ultimately be exercised by regulators and governments.

Across the Global Risks Report, and other Davos panels, fragmentation and geoeconomic adaptation needs weren’t framed as distant possibilities but more treated as operating conditions. Trade, finance, and digital interdependence were discussed as strategic terrain for the first time in any depth, at least to my observation. One of the more striking refrains was that “digital assets are moving from the edges of finance into its core, increasingly treated as infrastructure rather than instruments,” which mirrored the way many institutional voices are now starting to talk about settlement and capital markets.

That shift matters hugely, because it moves the conversation away from winners and losers, or one system replacing another, and toward something more historical in nature. This isn’t a winner takes all outcome, it’s a post-industrial shift to a new world that, perhaps idealistically, has the potential to provide what I have often mooted -that the global south doesn’t need help, it just needs to be able to operate on a level playing field. That reality is now being spoken about seriously.

That said it is a long way off and there will be naysayers. But again, I think moving away from the polemics of the matter, this is a nuanced once in 200 year change, Unlike others I don’t see the future as USD dominance versus something else, or Web3 instead of Web2, or decentralisation over regulation. My sense is that this next phase is defined by how these layers can be most effectively combined, governed, and made to work together at national and regional scale.

This is where my work has been focused. Not on more products, but on thinking about and designing relationships and technology that can operate at the level where institutions, law, markets, infrastructure and most importantly people, intersect.

As a result of the conversations at Davos, TintraOS has just released a white paper outlining what the move to a multipolar world might look like from the infrastructure layer. I will link it below.

We thought it would be helpful to share our thinking on this topic now that it is finally much more part of the public discourse. It describes a system that allows adaption and change, not as a push against the prevailing status quo; but as augmentation to it. We do not claim to have solved anything, but Tintra’s multidisciplinary team delivered this paper as a way of putting a problem on the table that thousands of public and private sector actors will be working through over the next decade.

Davos moved to covering the exact topic we have hundreds of thousands of person hours dedicated to. The hope is the paper gives some shape to those discussions and stimulates further discussion around the topic. The change will be multi-generational, and the world can’t afford proprietary thinking if it’s going to change in a way that most benefits people and communities.

This isn’t all going to be headline grabbing work. The driver will be in how these change manifest in quieter ways: in how easily trade settles, in how capital circulates, in access to capital evolving, if the price of Fx reduces or how much economic life feels open and accessible to moe people rather than distant and exclusionary.

As another Davos roundtable captured it, “operational resilience in financial services is no longer a compliance exercise — it is becoming a source of competitive advantage,” a framing that says a great deal about how the centre of gravity is shifting.

This work matters deeply to me. I have focused on the global south most of my adult life and the opportunity to be able to utilise that experience to contribute to how the upcoming shift will affect billions of lives is the focus of my life’s work.

Whilst we struggle in most western countries these days to make anything not adversarial, this isn’t a picking sides challenge, it’s how can we work together to adapt and change the realities of the future.

To that end Tintra has released a white paper to discuss the ideas discussed at Davos and more, setting out some departure thinking points to stimulate ideas and conversation. It is intended as a contribution to the global conversation — for policymakers, builders, and thinkers who are exploring with what the shift means in practice rather than in theory.

You can find the Institutional Financial Infrastructure for a Multipolar World White Paper at https://www.tintra.net/white-paper/multipolarity