BFW digitaal / RBF numérique 2018/6

Brexit is an important event for countries like Belgium which are heavily exposed to the UK’s economy. As talks on a Withdrawal Agreement and a future relationship between the UK Government and the European Commission’s Brexit Task Force are ongoing, this paper provides an assessment of 5 possible scenarios for Brexit: a no-deal leading to ‘cliff-edge’ chaos and a future relationship based on WTO commitments, an extension of the art.50 negotiation period, an extension of the transition period, a comprehensive EU-UK free trade agreement, and the UK’s ‘White Paper’ proposal. We show that for an orderly divorce with continued intense economic relations, one or both parties must move away from their ‘red lines’. The outcome of the negotiations is therefore impossible to predict at the moment, also because sound economic reasoning is falling victim to politics and these are most volatile in the UK. We conclude with an overview of the impact of the Brexit scenarios discussed on parties’ principles.

The fast development of robo-advice has responded to a growing demand for automation and enhanced capabilities to industrialize investment advisory (IA) solutions in the FinTech landscape. Until recently, the first generation of robo-advisors have naturally focused on the low-end segment of the IA market, mostly thanks to a rather low sophistication of the portfolio allocation systems based on simplistic versions of Modern Portfolio Theory, leaving wealth managers with no serious competition from fully digitized solutions. Nowadays, the second generation of robo-advisors is more ambitious, both from a scientific and an ergonomic point of view. Even though we are not yet witnessing the age of industrialized big data or machine learning fully automated investment advisors, the maturity level of today’s robo-advisors is sufficient to accommodate behavioral sources of complexity like mental accounting or loss aversion at the investor’s level. The pressure on margins induced by regulation and digitalization gradually increases the competitive advantage of robotized IA in the mass affluent and private banking segments, making them a serious threat to those incumbent firms that cannot adapt with proper tooling or niche offering. In the near future, the mature generation of robo-advisors, with full deep learning and data treatment capacities, will presumably coexist with those firms that have been actively preparing today, that will use performant tools besides human expertise, but in a world in which fees will presumably have largely decreased and service quality will have been improved, at the benefit of the customer.

Cette étude examine si le Bitcoin peut (ou pourrait) constituer une alternative crédible à l’euro ou au dollar. Est-il une menace pour la politique monétaire, ou, au contraire, doit-il constituer une source d’inspiration pour les banquiers centraux ? Le bitcoin fait face à de nombreux défis. Premièrement, il est loin de constituer un système de paiement stable et fiable, comme l’aurait voulu ses concepteurs. Deuxièmement, le bitcoin est, par nature, un objet quasi-ingouvernable. Troisièmement, le bitcoin, contrairement à ce que pourraient penser ses défenseurs, ne permet pas de protéger efficacement les données et la vie privée de ses utilisateurs. Pour autant, le Bitcoin n’est pas sans intérêt. L’article se conclut par quelques pistes qui pourraient inspirer, notamment, les banques centrales.