After paving the way for digital currency innovation at the Bank of England, or BoE, Mark Carney has officially joined the board of Stripe – a company dedicated to building new commerce solutions for the Internet.
Stripe introduced Carney as a board member on Sunday, joining Christa Davies, Diane Greene, Jonathan Chadwick, Sir Michael Moritz, and Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison. The US digital payments company says it will benefit from Carney’s “extensive experience with global financial systems and governance,” especially as it rolls out new climate efforts.
“The nature of the trade has changed over the past decade,” said Carney. “Stripe has been at the forefront of enabling this new digital economy by providing innovative and resilient global payment solutions to businesses large and small.”
He went on:
“I look forward to supporting Stripe in the coming years to build the global infrastructure that will allow the Internet to become the engine for strong and inclusive economic growth.”
Founded in 2011, Stripe markets itself as a complete payment processing platform for e-commerce and other forms of online business. The company first worked in Bitcoin (BTC) in 2014 before rolling out BTC payments the following year. However, Stripe would eventually drop BTC functionality in 2018 due to high costs and slow confirmation times. In October 2019, Stripe also left the Facebook-backed Libra project, which has since been rebranded as Diem.
Although Stripe has given up on Bitcoin payments, co-founder John Collison has for now expressed a positive stance on the future of cryptocurrencies, especially in emerging markets where payment systems are still developing.
Carney has also expressed a favorable view of digital assets, especially those backed by central banks. At the Jackson Hole Symposium in 2019, Carney envisioned a future where a central bank digital currency, or CBDC, could replace the US dollar as a global reservation currency.
“It is an open question whether such a new Synthetic Hegemonic Currency is best delivered by the public sector, perhaps through a network of central bank digital currencies,” he said at the time.
Carney is nearly a year removed from his position as governor of the BoE. Under his seven-year tenure, the central bank tackled the economic fallout from Brexit and the start of the coronavirus pandemic.