Executive Briefing
Facebook’s new bank and currency: The big picture and some big questions
Also: The most interesting thing I learned at Cannes Lions.
By Dan Frommer on Friday, June 21, 2019 at 1:35 pm
The big story this week was Facebook’s long-awaited unveiling of a new global, internet-native currency, Libra, and the news that it’s launching its own banking subsidiary, Calibra, to support it.
Since the announcement was Tuesday, I won’t spend much time summarizing, but in short: Facebook has put together a group of leading organizations in finance and technology — including Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Spotify, Uber, Andreessen Horowitz, etc. — to collaborate on Libra, what’s intended to be an accessible, mainstream, fast, stable cryptocurrency, open for anyone to build services and applications around, from mobile payments and e-commerce to more elaborate financial offerings like lending.
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