IADI 2023 ANNUAL CONFERENCE Wednesday, September 27, 2023
Mike Hanson Opening Statement Thank you for joining us at this important conference. Once again, we at MSIC hope you’re having a wonderful time, and I hope the meetings will be productive. For today, we really want to mix it up a little bit. We want to talk about some of the challenges that we’re facing as deposit insurers, and I hope we have a robust discussion. I hope we have a nice level of disagreement. I hope we reach some kind of consensus as to what the issues are that are facing us.
Can a free people govern themselves? Like all great human experiments, the results are far from certain. And all you need to do is look at our evening news to know that we air our problems publicly, and we have a long way to go, as many societies do. It’s a constant innovation and struggle. That revolution in thought, believe it or not, started about a mile from here in Boston. Boston at its heart is today still a revolutionary society; often, we forget that fact. I hope you will have some time to go see this revolutionary city while you are here this week. I hope you go to the old State House to see where the Declaration of Independence was first read to the citizens of Massachusetts; Bunker Hill with its obelisk representing of the first battle of the Revolution; and to Faneuil Hall to stand before the statue of Samuel Adams. Three or four years before 1776, it was Samuel Adams, John Hancock and their colleagues who created The American Revolution that started here in Boston. You can see the hall where those meetings of ordinary citizens started the process that led to the Revolution and America’s great experiment. And true to American style, Faneuil Hall now sits in a beautiful shopping area, so you can spend some time helping the economy and you can also get a Sam Adams lager while you’re there. It’s worth the trip. I think it’s appropriate that we’re here in this revolutionary city, and MSIC is delighted to be your host. And why is it appropriate? It’s appropriate because the industry we insure - banking, credit unions, cooperatives - is now going through a massive revolutionary transformational change. And it will dramatically affect how we do our business. Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, AI, new fintech methods of loan originations like the standardization of credit processes, not to mention the continuing effects of securitization, the ever-growing massive concentration of assets in individual large banks - these pose, and are already posing, significant risks for us and the economies we represent. Significant risk is also resulting from major demographic shifts with younger consumers doing banking in a completely different way with different new technologies, and using institutions that are outside of the traditional banking system. And don’t forget the use and abuse of social media: we all now need to become experts in consumer behavior as well as deposit insurance.
We want to talk about some of the challenges that we’re facing as deposit insurers, and I hope we have a robust discussion.
So let me begin. As I welcome you all to Boston, and I look around this audience and I see so many honorable and long- standing cultures before me, our friends from Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Kenya, Ghana, Italy, France, Poland, among many others, and I say to myself “how do I introduce Boston?” How do I explain Boston to these long-standing and honorable cultures? I thought long and hard about this topic this week as to how I would welcome you to this city. As you can see from looking outside, Boston is a thriving and growing community. It is vastly innovative. It’s an intellectual center and a commercial hub. Great companies got their start here - Microsoft, Facebook, and Fidelity to name just a few. MIT alone has spun off 25,000 companies from its world class and cutting-edge research. When I was in law school decades ago, Kendall Square in Cambridge was a dirt parking lot. Today it is an innovation center with hundreds of billions of dollars in development and investment, including companies from pharmaceuticals to high tech start-ups. But Boston is also a very young society - and at only 250 years old compared with the cultures represented by my colleagues here today - Boston, and America remains an experiment:
16 INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION
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