The Economist’s Swarup Gupta on cash, privacy and data in a digital future

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview. I’m Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, a global content resource examining big themes that will impact the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide. Today, we’re exploring the future of money, and who better than Swarup Gupta, lead industry analyst for financial services at The Economist Intelligence Unit, the research arm of The Economist, to help us explore that topic. Gupta is an expert on digital finance, including central bank, digital currencies, and cryptocurrencies, as well as issues of privacy and data protection. It certainly sounds like we have a lot to talk about, so Swarup, I appreciate you joining us today.

Swarup Gupta: My pleasure, Joe. Thank you for having me.

Joe Kornik: So, let’s talk about the future of money, and specifically, the rise of digital currencies and cryptocurrencies, whether that’d be Bitcoin or other currencies from the private sector or the central banks. What’s your view of where digital currencies go over the next three to five or even 10 years, and what are the potential impacts of that evolution?

Swarup Gupta: Right. So, even now, across the greatest part of the planet, cash is definitely—it remains king, and it continues to be the major mode of payment, but there are various estimates that show that as a mode of payment, cash would decline to as low as 5% by 2030 to 2031. So, digitalization is something that is definitely picking up, and that is likely to continue over the rest of this decade and then even farther, and it’s quite likely that some form of digital payments will emerge in different parts of the world. It could take up different forms across the planet.

For example, real-time payments, very fast digital payments, are a reality across several countries in Southeast Asia, many of whom have also simultaneously all, prior to this, rolled digital identity services; whereas the private sector might actually take up a major role in the developed countries as we can see. First, for example, in the U.S. with Venmo, and now with the progress and the unceasing march of Apple Pay. Digital payments are definitely going to take center stage. The use of cash is going to fall, and that’s going to take several forms. That’s going to be the real-time payment systems; instant payment systems, both private and public; a small amount of cryptocurrencies; and ultimately, central bank digital currencies, which I’m sure, will come to innovate.

Joe Kornik: Right. That’s kind of where I was going next. As digital currencies become more mainstream, and as you pointed out, I think we’re all in agreement that it’s heading that way. What do you view as the role of governments or international bodies in regulating those currencies, and who takes the lead on such an effort, and what does that potentially mean for the U.S. dollar, and assuming it has a diminished role in the future, what could potentially replace the U.S. dollar?

Swarup Gupta: Well, let me start with the faith of the U.S. dollar. I’m afraid for the next years of the U.S. dollar, that isn’t happening any time soon. Lots of statistics show that almost 90% of cross-border transactions in Southeast Asia, definitely one of the fastest growing parts of the planet, is conducted using the U.S. dollar. Whether as an initial form of conversion or as a last-mile channel in which you convert different currencies across the region. So, yes, the U.S. dollar’s share of foreign trade is likely to decline over time, perhaps over the next decade, but that’s not happening any time soon.

At the same time, the U.S. government itself has shown, especially through the action of the SEC, that it wants to take back the use of money as a sovereign tool of governance and policy making. The way it’s gone after crypto exchanges in particular, those which have refused to register, shows that the U.S. government, and in fact, governments across the world, are keen to reassert their sovereignty over money as a form of exchange of value. So definitely governments will take an increasingly important role, whether it’s through government-backed real-time payment systems like the U.S.’ FedNow, or multi-CBDCs, or CBDCs themselves.

Coming to CBDCs, there are various benefits to the promotion and introduction of a CBDC. It encourages innovation in many spheres, enhances efficiency and reduces cost for internal as well as external economies in terms of foreign exchange transactions, and also promotes greater financial inclusion, not just in the developing world, but surprise, surprise, also in developed countries where large amounts of cash dominate population. So here, by financial inclusion, I’m not referring only to a poverty element, but also access to financial services of multiple kinds, for example, debit and credit services and insurance.

So, it’s going to be a very gated development of central bank digital countries across the world. Several initiatives have actually taken off. For example, China, Hongkong, Japan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have experimented not just with retail CBDCs, but also with wholesale CBDCs. CBDC development is proceeding along two forks. One is retail, and the other is wholesale. While a lot of attention of both policy makers and analysts and the press is devoted to retail CBDCs, what is likely to take off initially is wholesale CBDCs, and that is related to another issue we’ll probably come to later in the conversation, which I would try and end with this particular section.

So, wholesale CBDCs are concerned more with interbank payments, and essentially, are trying to replace or reset the financial infrastructure of a country as it exists in pre-digitalization format. Basically, if countries can digitalize a large part of their financial transactions within a country, it improves transactions, it improves efficiencies, reduces transaction cost, and essentially shortens the chain which is required when a currency is converted into another currency. This itself has taken several forms. The most common form is using a single token, which is issued jointly by multiple commercial banks across countries. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have been working on a similar project where the same token is issued by multiple banks. The other form that it has taken is known as a multi-CBDC format, where CBDCs of different countries, different CBDCs are interoperable and operate with the similar financial infrastructure and rules governing them.

The retail CBDC, which has seen the most research, has only taken off in China, and even there, it hasn’t been as popular and it hasn’t gotten as much traction as was expected, and that’s not surprising because you already have the likes of Alipay and WeChat filling in for that role in that particular country. And in the developed world and even in developing countries, the introduction of retail CBDCs leads to important and difficult questions about privacy and anonymity.

Joe Kornik: Yes, absolutely. We’re going to get to privacy in just a minute. I know that’s a topic that’s near and dear to your heart, but before we do that, I just wanted to talk a little bit about some of the countries you mentioned. China, we’ve heard a lot about the yuan perhaps taking a leadership role. I’ve read a lot about the BRIC countries and a currency coming out of the BRIC countries. I’m just wondering if you had any thoughts on that, or what’s your take on those currencies potentially taking a leading role.

Swarup Gupta: Well, I have discussed this and commented on this publicly, and let me tell you that a BRIC currency at this point is a bit of a non-starter. Let me start with the status of the BRIC itself. More and more countries want to jump onto the BRIC bandwagon for reasons of their own. It might have to find a new name for itself. I’m not running it down, it’s an important agglomeration of countries. But at the same time, the BRIC itself is terribly lopsided. Any currency born out of a basket of currencies which make up the currencies of BRIC countries will be dominated overwhelmingly by the digital yuan, and definitely will satisfy China’s ambitions of internationalizing its currency, but at the same time, will other countries agree? India and China, for example, have fairly prickly relations, whereas China’s relation with other countries are perhaps better. So, that’s a bit of a non-starter even though the Brazilian president has gone on record discussing the need for a BRIC currency.

So, what is likely to happen is a diversification away from the U.S. dollar to a basket of currencies, and what is that basket going to look like? It’s going to be the euro, the yuan, and several other allied currencies. So essentially, the gap between the U.S. dollar and other currencies sort of declines to a certain extent, but the U.S. dollar overwhelmingly dominates as a share of foreign trade over the foreseeable future, which is the next five years, for instance.

Joe Kornik: Got you. Thank you for those views. It’s very interesting. I do want to dig a little deeper now into the potential impacts of digital currencies, specifically how privacy and anonymity will be affected. What’s the potential fallout from where you sit, and how does that vary by various parts of the planet, geopolitical realities, et cetera?

Swarup Gupta: Before we start this very important bit of this discussion, I’d like to try and define those terms, privacy and anonymity. Privacy is something that even the UN has guaranteed as a right. Essentially, it means that you keep your data safe and secure, and you ensure that only those whom you provide specific rights to, have the right to view that data. For example, iMessage, for long and still now has encrypted messaging, and when you send an iMessage to another person, say me, for instance, you would expect that only I would read that particular message and not any other person in your address book. So, that’s privacy.

Anonymity is a slightly more controversial concept. Anonymity means that you have a fake handle or you use an anonymous handle—let me be clear, not a fake handle but an anonymous handle—on a specific social media service. So, in this case, your identity remains secret, but your activities may or may not remain secret. So anonymity, in fact, is a more extreme form of privacy, and it’s absolutely impossible to guarantee in a digitalized world. The reason for that is any form of digital payment, whether it’s a real-time payment service run by an institution backed by the government, or it’s Venmo, or it's Apple Pay, inherently leaves a trail, an auditable trail of transactions. Not just a trail of transactions, but it also discloses interesting nuggets about your spending behavior and your life in general. That is something—complete anonymity in digital transactions is something that only cash can guarantee. But cash, as you know, is on its way out, and because of the capability of digital payments to generate this auditable trail, there are significant privacy concerns.

So, that is one aspect of it. You might argue that “Look, this is exactly why the proponents of cryptocurrency came up with Bitcoin,” right? Because in this case, not only are you, as a user, anonymous, your transactions are also perhaps anonymous. Yes, you can track that in the case of malfeasance, some protocols have now evolved, but the sender and receiver of those transactions remain inherently anonymous. Well, I would argue actually that that’s not anonymity but pseudo-anonymity because the entire distributed ledger can be viewed, especially by the concerned authorities. They reveal several identifiers which are about us. For example, our age, our gender, our race, and our location even can be tracked, and you can tie that together and then get a fair idea whether Joe or Swarup was using a particular distributed ledger chain to engage in transactions.

So, to round up what I’m trying to say here, the demise of cash has finally ended a completely anonymous form of transacting value, so money or hard cash was the only completely anonymous way of storing value over time in exchange. Digital payments have ended that, which has led to multiple concerns around privacy, who owns the data, who shares the data, who has rights to the data, and which authorities can gain access to which part of the data.

Joe Kornik: Yes, interesting. You touched on a lot there, and I think one of the things that worries people a lot about a new world or digital currency is the potential for fraud, crime, money laundering, and probably some other things that I’m not even aware of in this new, potentially unregulated future. So, how concerned should we be about that, and what can companies or countries do to protect people and data?

Swarup Gupta: I think those concerns that you raised, Joe, are extremely pertinent, and as monetary payment schemes become increasingly digitalized, digital financial crimes, the occurrence of those activities just go up, which leads also to strict anti-money laundering regulations, many of whom are now internationally prescribed to for various agencies. They need to follow them. This is exactly why the proponents of CBDCs or authorities who wish to issue CBDCs argue that if you back the issuance of CBDCs, you would enable us to crack down on money laundering activities, on financial crime of various kinds, and illegal transactions.

However, again, we circle back to those privacy concerns, especially in countries where there is greater awareness of one’s digital rights. So, it’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation. How do you guarantee at least a minimum or a maximum modicum of privacy rights? I would argue that the U.S., for example, or any other developed country could actually take the lead on this by saying, “Look, my CBDC is more private than yours.” Because it offers a greater level of privacy, to the extent of offering a level of pseudo-anonymity, you could just continue to flock into the U.S. dollar.

Joe Kornik: Swarup, thank you so much for your time today. You’ve been very generous of your time. I have just one more question. If I ask you to look out to 2030 or even 2035, how do you see all this playing out? I mean, ultimately, what do you see is the financial future, and will it be a good place, will we like it, or would we long for the good old days of the 2020s?

Swarup Gupta: Well, you definitely will long for the good old days of the 2010s and ’20s because as I’ve said, cash will probably decline to 5% of all transactions globally. But let me just bring in something which has become a bit of a watchword recently, which is AI. You will definitely see AI figure more on both the supply and demand side of money, you will have more and more people using AI as a marketing tool, including the market financial services. At the same time, you will have AI-enabled tools, both generative and predictive, managing a lot of your monetary activities. So, some of the things that we are now trying to achieve or striving to achieve in various parts of the globe, people will just take as given: automation, instant, seamless, crossborder payments, very efficient, very low transaction cost, and of course, assisted by AI, which means that it takes out a lot of the drudgery related to both financial planning and transations.

Joe Kornik: Swarup, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate the conversation. Fascinating.

Swarup Gupta: Thanks, Joe.

Joe Kornik: And thank you for watching the VISION by Protiviti interview. For Swarup Gupta, I’m Joe Kornik. We’ll see you next time.

Economist Peter Henry offers a roadmap for a more equitable and prosperous future

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti Interview. I’m Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, a global content resource examining big themes that will impact the C-suite and executive board rooms worldwide. Today, we’re exploring the future of money, and I couldn’t be happier to welcome in Dr. Peter Henry, Protiviti board member, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, senior fellow at Standford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and dean emeritus of NYU Stern School of Business. He is also the author of the very important and influential book Turnaround: Third-World Lessons for First-World Growth. Peter, thank you so much for joining me today.

Peter Henry: Great to be with you, Joe. Thank you for having me on.

Joe Kornik: Peter, it’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years since your book was published. In it, you talk about the significant progress developing countries had made and how first-world nations were in crisis, and in fact, we’re being held up largely by those emerging economies. It seems like a lot of the problems you were talking about a decade ago—income inequality, climate, hyperinflation, political uncertainty—are even greater challenges today. We’ve also witnessed developments no one would have predicted 10 years ago, financial setbacks in some of the emerging economies due to COVID, and the adoption of cryptocurrency in some developing economies to offset devaluing fiat currencies and provide a hedge to political instability. I’m curious, if you wrote a sequel to Turnaround today, what would you say are the lessons from the last 10 years and how do they shape your view of the future?

Peter Henry: Thank you for the question, Joe. It’s a great question and it is the right question. I think, when I look back, I think that what I would say is that policies really matter. Policy decisions that are made by our leaders have a dramatic impact for the lives of everyday people. That’s true in both first-world countries as well as third-world countries. In Turnaround, I was making the point that the way forward for first-world countries back in 2013, in a positive way, would look a lot like the policy recommendations that the first world had made for the third world back in the 1970s and 1980s.

What have we seen? Somewhat disappointingly, I don’t think that first-world countries have made a lot of progress on what I would call the structural policy fronts. What do I mean by that? In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, we had this narrative of central bankers as heroes. Ben Bernanke did a tremendous job of creating—and the Federal Reserve more broadly­—of creating new financial instruments, quantitative easing, and so forth, that really helped us cope with the dramatic financial crisis. But then I think what happened is that the structural changes—so things like addressing educational policy, things like focusing on reforming immigration laws in the United States, right, because we need—think about it, in order for economy to grow, we need capital, labor, and ideas. Okay. If you want to grow, you need to grow the labor force, and we know that we got an aging population and we haven’t dealt in a systemic way with our need for more skilled foreign workers in particular. So we’ve not made a lot of progress on that front. Consequently, we’ve had slowing productivity.

This is not just a US-specific story. It’s a developed, first-world country story. Europe hasn’t made much progress on these issues either. Their population is aging even more rapidly than ours. In the absence of addressing what I would call these structural issues—and I haven’t even mentioned yet the challenges of Brexit, because I’m going to say, in addition to learning that policies really matter, the second lesson, which I’ll come to in a second, is that politics matter, at least as much as policies, because the politics really drive whether policies get through. But in the absence of these structural economic reforms that we needed to see in advanced economies to continue driving productivity growth so standards of living can continue to rise, we just had central bankers doing more and more to lower interest rates, keep interest rates low, and the debate was all around how low can they stay for how long, how long can quantitative easing continue. While all this was happening, our elected officials, both in the United States and abroad, didn’t really do very much to address these underlying structural issues that are really at the heart of what drives an economy: innovation, policies to encourage capital accumulation, and the free movement of labor, particularly getting more high-skilled labor into economies like the United States that really need it.

If you think about, for instance, the inflation challenges we’re dealing with right now, one of the issues is that the demand for goods and services is outstripping the supply of goods and services. What determines the supply of goods and services? Well, a really important factor that is the quantity of labor. We know there’s a labor shortage. That gets down to, again, immigration and education to create ways to help us have a greater labor supply. Those are some of the policies, and of course, as well, the inflation challenges we’re dealing with. Emerging economies, we’re dealing with those issues front and center in the 70s and 80s and we learned that if you want to keep inflation low, you need to keep interest rates at a reasonable level and manage fiscal policy. Of course, we’ve had large and growing deficits, large expansion of the money supply coupled with some shocks, the war in Ukraine, spiking food prices, and we’re struggling to get inflation down to a 2% target.

Joe Kornik: Right. Inflation is the elephant in the room. It continues to cause a drag globally. The US at least has made some progress with inflation but still has some way to go for sure.

Peter Henry: One of the really important lessons that I think we also have not learned in the advanced world, for emerging economies, is how to deal with inflation, in the following sense. If you go back to 2022 when inflation hit its peak, it was almost 10% in the United States and it was above 10% in both the UK and the European Union. That’s what we would call, by historical standards, if you also look at emerging economies, moderate inflation, because we have double-digit inflation that’s not as high as 40% but above single-digit inflation. We haven’t seen that kind of inflation in advanced economies since the 70s.

There’s been an expectation that the Fed, the ECB, and the Bank of England were going to be able to bring down moderate inflation, rapidly get back down to the 2% target, and engineer a so-called soft landing. Well, I think people overestimated how easy that was going to be because they ignored a rich history of developing countries trying to reduce moderate inflation. Yes, some developing countries have had hyperinflation, like Argentina and Brazil, but there are at least 56 episodes between 1976 and 1994 in emerging economies of countries that had inflation that were double digit, not 40% but 15% or so, that tried to reduce moderate inflation. What you learn from looking at those 56 historical episodes, reducing moderate inflation to low single-digit inflation is very, very hard. It typically fails because it’s so hard to do. It typically takes about three years or so, and you look at the historical record for countries to do that. If we learned that lesson, I think that we’d be having a slightly different view of how costly and how long it was going to take to reduce inflation.

If you look at England right now, or the UK, they’re looking more and more like an emerging economy frankly, with their debt problems and their inflation problem really not looking like it’s going to come down where they want anytime soon. The European Union is already in recession, so odds of a soft landing there are looking tough. The US may still make it, but we’ve got core inflation still running at 4.8% with a target of 2%, and very importantly, everyone’s asking how high rates have to go and how long do they have to stay in order for us to get down to 2%, but nobody is asking the question how rapidly do we need to get down to 2%? If you look at a country like Chile in 1992 when they first announced their inflation target, they made a decision that they were going to—they were coming down from inflation around 20%, and they eventually got down to single-digit inflation, but they did it very gradually over a course of several years. I’ve not heard in the current policy debate clarity from the Fed about how much of a hurry are we in to get to that 2%? Because that actually really makes a difference in terms of the impact on the economy of getting to 2%. If you try to go really rapidly, then the risk of a hard landing is greater.

Joe Kornik: When you look at the next two, three, five years, from a macroeconomic standpoint, from a global economy, what shape do you think we’re in? How optimistic are you or how concerned should we be?

Peter Henry: The thing that gives me optimism is the dynamism and the population growth that we see in the emerging world, so sub-Saharan Africa in particular. Right? The rich world is aging, much of the emerging world, sub-Saharan Africa in particular, has a rapidly growing young population. Those are lots of potentially productive workers to help living standards continue to rise. Now the challenge there, of course, is that those workers in emerging economies are working with a deficiency of capital, so specifically, think about infrastructure. Okay. There a billion people in the world without access to electricity and another billion people who don’t live within 5 kilometers of an all-season road or a road that functions all year round. The vast majority of those people actually live in sub-Saharan Africa where the population is growing most rapidly.

What we have to do is figure out how to do a better job of having the global financial system find a way to allocate capital to those kinds of infrastructure projects that can generate economic growth. For instance, if a $1.00 invested in infrastructure in Zambia can generate $1.40 of GDP, that’s a 40% return. Right? There are reasons to believe that the rate of return on infrastructure is that high in some places in the world. I’ve done the research on it. I come up with this idea called the dual hurdle framework, which basically says if the rate of return on investing in a road in Zambia is higher than the rate of return on private capital in Zambia, then the Zambian government should want to invest in roads.

Similarly, if the rate of return on investing in a road in Zambia is higher than the rate of return on S&P 500, there ought to be some folks in the US who are trying to figure out a way to invest in roads in Zambia. In other words, if investing in infrastructure in emerging markets clears both of those hurdles, then that’s a win-win. It’s a win for Zambia because investing in Zambian roads generates more GDP and jobs for their citizens, which reduces overall immigration pressure, people want to move out of that country, but it also generates returns for asset holders in rich countries where growth is slow and the population is aging.

I’m optimistic because we’ve got tremendous population growth in the emerging world, but in order for that optimism to actually turn into a reality of higher global growth for everybody and higher asset returns in the United States and elsewhere in the rich world, we’ve got to figure out this capital allocation problem, and I think the dual hurdle framework could help us do that.

Joe Kornik: Right. I’m wondering how, just the future of money per se, the rise of cryptos, the rise of digital currencies, I think most people are in agreement that those certainly will be the wave of the future, and specifically how central banks manage monetary policy around—with the emergence of cryptos and digital currencies. How do you see that playing out and what could that mean for the economy? I mean, could there be a leveling effect from a global standpoint, from an equitable standpoint?

Peter Henry: I think it’s very exciting to talk about shiny, new things. Cryptocurrency and digital currency certainly fall in that category. I think it’s important, when thinking about where we are, to use a baseball analogy, we’re probably somewhere in the first inning, if not – I think we’re maybe past the world’s but we’re still in the first inning. What I mean by that, well, just think about order of magnitude, the value of money, broadly speaking, in circulation in the global economy is probably, it’s upwards of $100 trillion in US dollar terms. The value of crypto is probably $1 trillion. When you’re thinking about macroeconomic policy right now, I don’t think this is a major factor in how central banks are thinking about how they’re dealing with monetary policy. Having said that, of course, central banks have many jobs, one of which is to think about what role these currencies may play in the future. I suspect that digital currencies are going to be more important than crypto. It’s hard to see a world in which central banks are going to give up the role of basically being the creators of fiat money. Right? They’ve done that historically through paper money, let’s call it. They have been increasingly already doing that to some extent through digital currency by default. I don’t see a world in which central banks are not playing a major role.

The basic role of the central bank is making sure that we don’t have too much money in circulation, whether it’s digital or paper or some combination of those things, relative to the supply of goods and services, that role is not going to change. But central banks will have interesting things to think about. Right? I don’t see the dichotomy being so much first versus third world as it's going to be thinking about, well, in a world in which the central bank can issue digital currency, how do we think about the transmission of monetary policy, the role of banks for instance in open market operations? Right? Traditionally, banks and financial institutions, major financial institutions, played a major role in the conduct of open market operations. But in a world of digital currency, one could think about, “Well, why does it all have to get integrated into the banks? Can’t we let households participate directly in some of these things?”

So it’s the first inning, lots of important questions, but the reality that we now will have, I think, different means by which this principal monetary policy could get conducted, different mechanisms, may raise some interesting questions about the democracy, how flat the system is in terms of the way monetary policy is implemented. I don’t pretend to have the answers to those questions, but central banks, trust me, are thinking about these issues, or should be thinking about these issues.

Joe Kornik: Peter, any advice you’d offer for business leaders, C-suite executives, directors, boards, as they try to look out and navigate the next decade, let’s say?

Peter Henry: Yes, I think it’s important to remember, what is the role of a leader? Role of a leader is to define reality and give hope. Okay. What’s the reality? The reality is, coming out of COVID, there’s a lot of talk of deglobalization. Global trade, in the context of a stable macroenvironment—which we can’t take for granted as we now see with the inflation rounds we’re dealing with—but global trade, assuming central banks do their job and return us to low, stable, predictable inflation, global trade in that environment is probably the single biggest policy driver of prosperity. We need more global trade, not less. The idea then of deglobalization I think is overwrought, although there certainly was a reaction in the aftermath of COVID.

I think the right way to think about global trade in the aftermath of COVID is we need, in addition to the efficient distribution of supply chains and labor and capital in lots of different places around the world, which raises productivity, when you think about more resilient supply chains, right? There’s a trade-off between efficiency and resilience, meaning, as leaders think about how to build their supply chains to deliver goods and services at lower cost, they’ve also got to think about diversification, and we’re already seeing some of that, right, diversification in places like Vietnam is now booming. India has great promise, right, as do other parts in South Asia. I talked previously about sub-Saharan Africa. Right? We need more global trade, not less, and so leaders need to think very hard about, “Okay. How do we deliver for our organizations in an environment where we know that 10 years from now, 20 years from now, we’re going to need more global trade, not less? How do we advocate for the right kinds of policies in our countries to make sure that we actually do see the kinds of changes that are needed in order to ensure that we get infrastructure, right, in places that have booming populations like sub-Saharan Africa?” Because these will be the growth centers of the future. Right? Why should business leaders care about these things? Well, because that’s where the population growth is and that’s where the potential GDP growth is higher.

Joe Kornik: Right. Well, you’ve given us a lot to think about here today. My last question is just you’ve laid out a very intriguing roadmap for the future, and I just wonder if we could take that roadmap and extend it out maybe two decades, a generation even. What’s possible if we do this right? What kind of world could we be living in 2040s or even 2050?

Peter Henry: Yes. I love the question. We could be living in a world where there’s substantially less poverty. We’ll still have to deal with income distribution. Human beings have a tendency to ask, “I’ve got a good life for my family. Your life for your family is even better than my life,” so we got to figure out how to manage that challenge, and that’s an age-old challenge that goes all the way back to the Ten Commandments and not being envious of what your neighbor has. Those problems of human nature are a lot easier to solve when everyone has a lot more. So, there’s the potential to have a greener planet with far less poverty and far more dignity for more human beings and an even more prosperous world. [Music]

Joe Kornik: Right. Well, that sounds like the kind of place we would all like to end up for sure. Peter, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Peter Henry: Thank you, Joe. I enjoyed the conversation.

Joe Kornik: Yes, I did as well. I really enjoyed those insights. Thank you for watching the VISION by Protiviti Interview. On behalf of Dr. Peter Henry, I’m Joe Kornik. We’ll see you next time.

Panel of Protiviti insurance experts discuss the future of asset protection in the metaverse

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti podcast. I'm Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, our global content resource examining big themes that will impact the C-Suite and executive boardrooms worldwide. Today, we're exploring insurance in a metaverse future, and we've got great guests to help us do that.

As we're joined by Protiviti insurance experts and managing directors, Sean Seasongood and Tom Luick, as well as director Jackie Simmons. And I'm happy to turn over the interviewing duties today to another Protiviti colleague, Alex Weishaupl, a managing director in Protiviti's Digital practice, to lead this important discussion. Alex, over to you to.

Alex Weishaupl: Thanks, Joe. When we talk about the metaverse at Protiviti, we're talking about both the customer-facing technologies that enable user experiences; those virtual reality or mixed reality technologies that users engage with via screens or advanced headsets, and how they serve as interfaces to a host of enabling tech made-up of everything from decentralized systems like blockchain to more traditional systems and data stores. The key to all of this is interoperability, that these systems come together to power compelling experiences for their consumers.

Excited to be here today with Tom, Jackie and Shawn so we can talk about the metaverse and how this group of technologies and ways of engaging users are poised to affect the insurance industry. Let's get started.

My first question for the group is what are some of the key issues you see in the current insurance customer experience and how might the metaverse help to address any of those issues or those gaps?

Shawn Seasongood: Thanks Alex, I'll take that first. So I think insurance companies have really been looking at, you know, two different models. There's been the legacy model, which is more of an agent sales experience, and there's also the direct model. I do think that, you know, there's a lot of benefits from the legacy agent sales experience. But if you look at the way that companies are marketing themselves, there's much more consumers that want to go direct. And I think the metaverse could offer an experience that maintains that personal face-to-face interaction in the digital model, so thinking about in the future when you're able to introduce more visually engaging ways to help buyers understand product features and tradeoffs. This could be a great way where companies could really start to enhance their direct channels and their efforts around direct selling.

Me personally, I've experienced this recently, I purchased a golf cart in December. My first thought was to go to my traditional agent that does my homeowners and car and see if I could add a golf cart policy. Well, my particular agent didn't have that policy and asked me that, you know, I could buy it directly online, so I did my fair share of research. I thought I was pretty astute when it came to this topic, and even, you know, looking at some of the direct options I had, I was a little bit unsure as far as what kind of coverage I needed. Do I need collision plus liability? I'm in a flood zone so I need to have a flood insurance as well…

So, at the end of the day, I actually didn't buy the policy direct and I went to another agent that actually offered golf cart insurance and it was a pretty good experience. Spent 15 minutes with the agent. I was able to secure the right type of insurance, but I walked away knowing that, you know, I mean, spending 15 minutes with the person, you know, the total premium was probably around $300. And it was, you know, something that I thought that if that direct model had that enhanced feel and that experience that you might be able to get through a meta solution I think that you could see where, you know, companies are going to be spending a lot more time enhancing their capabilities in this space, again, to achieve that agent sales experience using sort of a meta sort of enhancement.<>So I kind of felt it first hand as far as what the current experience is versus what that experience might look like in the next 5 to 10 years.

Jackie Simmons: I think another component there, you know customer experience is critical for all companies, and insurance companies are not different. But there is a cost impact that is higher to some  organizations from a customer experience. There are a lot of costs associated with agency models and the ability to leverage alternative models of delivery can help from the cost side as well as enhance the customer experience. So bringing both of those together.<>Another example would be potentially in an employee benefits type of scenario, right? Typically you're sending a lot of folks on site to an organization to help train and understand all the types of benefits that are available to them. The use of metaverse technologies could actually streamline that and bring down the costs associated with it in order to deliver even advanced solutions as well as potentially increase the amount of sales that are happening within the employee benefit space just by giving them a different way of learning and engaging.

Weishaupl: That’s great. And it sounds like there are some real substantive areas where the metaverse might be able to improve, for lack of a better term, that sales and onboarding process within the insurance industry. I'd love to talk a little bit about other areas that could be impacted as well. And I think, for example, an area like claims processing which has historically been an area of friction for both policyholders and the insurance provider alike. What kind of changes could we expect in that process in a metaverse-enabled future?

Tom Luick: Thanks, Alex, This is Tom. I'll jump in here and go first. How a claim is processed, from the timeliness and quality of communication to how long the it takes to complete the claim and, you know, for example in the auto space have your automobile fixed, to the ultimate payout is really critical to the customers experience with the carrier. And if the claim is not handled to the customer's satisfaction, there's a good chance that the customer may leave.

So when I think about the impact of the metaverse in the claims process, I think about things like how could digital twins accelerate the process end to end and make the process more intimate and more aligned with the customer's preferences and expectation. So for example, if a customer had a digital twin that digital twin could have preferences on how that customer wants to be communicated to, what's the style of communication, how frequently they want to be communicated to and what's the platform. And I think that's critical throughout the claims process.

So if you are, you know, again sticking with the auto accident, if you're in an auto accident, I think one of the most important things that your insurer can do is communicate to you effectively in a way that you want to be communicated to. Or the automobiles themselves could have digital twins that could use, you know, IoT sensor data and other information, telematics data, etcetera, to better predict the damage that was done to the vehicles and avoid surprises in the repair shop process.

And then finally you think about, what about the repair shop? So if repair shops were to have digital twins, maybe that would help predict the best place for specific repairs to go. And that could be based on the workload at the repair shop, their experience, how customer review data aligns with the specific insured’s preferences and other factors. So I think there's a really significant opportunity for insurance carriers to leverage the metaverse in the claims space. And while we're probably not there yet—you'd have to build out all of these digital twins and so forth—I really think this is a fascinating opportunity for the industry to really improve the customer experience where it truly does matter most.

Simmons: You know, Tom, that is an excellent point on having a digital twin of a car. I would say this also is a potential to open up for new products because as the parent of a recent 16-year old, I would certainly pay more to have access to digital twin of my son's driving in the car and you know, maybe in the way it's utilized, right? Thankfully, they didn't have this technology when I was a kid, I probably would have gotten my car taken away a few times. But you know, as a parent, you know, safety of our of our family is critical, and I think you know, this does open up opportunity for products that we haven't even thought about.

Weishaupl: I think that's really exciting, that idea of kind of taking all of that insurance data and processes and decisions out of that black box so that more folks can see it, whether, Tom, as you were alluding to the customers or the partners, Jackie with employees and others, that notion that rather than having all of this information sitting in one place versus another, that that ability to combine them together and visualize that so that all of the different players are looking at the same information from the same perspective, is a really exciting way of opening up transparency and confidence in in the overall process.

I'd love to shift a little bit now to the employee experience. We know that there's a big turnover currently in talent across the insurance industry that we're going through right now, a bit of almost a generational changing of the guard. What do you see as some of the key causes for that turnover and are there any places where the metaverse could help?

Simmons: Yeah, I you know, this is an interesting thing and I think maybe I'm an interesting person to answer this question because I started my career as an actuary and that was probably five years and I was quickly out, right. We are probably not seeing as many individuals going into the actuarial space as we had historically. I think we're not seeing as many young grads wanting to move into the insurance space, not just in actuarial science, but also, you know, not even in claims, and even agents, right? We're not seeing the attachment to being an insurance agent, having the stature that it did probably 20 to 30 years ago. So I think that utilizing emerging technologies such as the metaverse can start to entice young professionals into the insurance space.

Luick: I agree, Jackie, I think. Omnichannel e-commerce is already happening for a lot of people, right? And the demographic that's involved in that is growing quickly and so is its economic power, right, as they become more lucrative in their careers and so forth. I think now is the time for insurance companies to start testing and learning in the metaverse. And that can be a huge attraction for young talent for these organizations, which, rightly or wrongly, are often perceived as not being very innovative. So I think there's a real opportunity to use this as a mechanism to start attracting talent, to show that a lot of these insurance companies are actually innovating, and innovating at a high pace in an area that's I think going to be extremely important to their futures. So there is an opportunity here to leverage the metaverse, to attract and retain the type of talent that insurance carriers and others in the industry, brokers and so forth, are looking for.

Seasongood: Yeah, and there's been no doubt that, you know, this has been a huge issue. Talent in the industry, probably for the last 10 to 15 years just based on the points that both Jackie and Tom are alluding to. It was a big problem before the pandemic, it became an increasingly bigger problem after the pandemic with the great resignation so how do we attract that next generation of insurance leadership has been something that the industry has been struggling with.<>So I do think, you know, as Tom and Jackie alluded to, the product development. If you have the opportunity to kind of look at these new interesting risks in the form of digital assets that might attract some people who traditionally might not have found insurance that interesting or who went to the different banks or different financial services companies. It might be a way of kind of getting that talent back into the insurance space. And I think a lot of has been talked about training. We talked about training the last time around claims. Within the metaverse, there is an opportunity to digitally show employees what to look for in an aftermath of a building or a big cat event.

You know you can't, and sure doesn't simulate huge events like fires and tornadoes in real time, or the real world. Just too costly, too expensive. And we talked about, if there's a big cat, the first time people are looking at these claim files or these claim events or the damage, you want them to be well trained as far as what to do. A lot of times, you know, the new newer generations, they want to work remotely so they've already kind of deployed things like drones, where they're able to take pictures. Based on different property damage and then based on that imagery you're able to kind of show people how to adjudicate these claims and to the point that we talked about before that might result in a more effective, more efficient claim adjudication process and that the underlying result will be a happier customer or policyholder that would be more likely to become a return customer.<>So I do think the metaverse is very, very important as far as attracting that next wave of talent, it is a big issue that the industry has been struggling for the last 15 years and I think it could be one of the solutions when it comes to both training and also attracting that next talent of insurance leadership.

Weishaupl: One question I have for you building on that, really excited about this theme of using these innovations as a way of creating more of a halo effect for the insurance industry to attract that new talent. I guess one of the other things I'm curious about within that space of the employee experience, does the insurance space struggle with consistency around things like claims and other things? Could we see this to the point that you started to allude to, Shawn, around experiential learning. Could that have an effect too on kind of normalizing or making more consistent processes, or is that already fairly well taking care of with within the insurance space?

Seasongood: Yeah, I definitely think around risk acceptance and underwriting practices, sometimes there is some subjectivity to that. I think you know the data that you can power from the meta could actually help to   that consistency. I look at other things like the sales cycle, you know, obviously those are the other areas where the meta could collect data and harvest that data in a way that is very powerful asset for the insurance company of the future. Most startup insurance companies are focusing first on data and data management and data science as sort of their starting point.

As far as what is that, you know, insurance company of the future specifically. It's not just within the PNC space I think life insurance companies have the same type of focus, so I definitely feel like that's an area to drive more consistency, to your point, to drive better outcomes for the insurance industry as whole.

Luick: I think that's a good point, and it would probably add just that not only is consistency important from an operational excellence perspective and a customer experience perspective, but there's also an opportunity here to manage compliance risk through the consistent execution of underwriting decisions, claims, process handling, et cetera.

Simmons: I think one of the challenges insurance companies have too is the ability to deploy talent across different lines and solutions. Sean, to your point on training, leveraging some of these technologies, it can do a few things. Younger generations really want to have a breadth of experiences. Gone are the days where somebody wants to come in and retire from the job that they entered, right? We all want to have those different experiences. So leveraging the metaverse for training can quickly get new grads, mid-careers, late careers up to speed more quickly, either in other products or other processes. That'll give the company a a few benefits, right? One is, the cost of talent has significantly increased. If you can leverage the talent that you have to do different types of roles as well as cover cyclical types of business, right. So when you have a downtime in one business but an increase in another, you can leverage your same staff across those different processes or products. It also gives you the ability to rapidly grow talent into leadership roles within the organization, which we all are desperately looking for. So I think leveraging the metaverse within the talent space could be the biggest benefit to an organization.

Weishaupl: That’s great. So far we've talked broadly about the customer experience and the employee experience. I'd love to get a little bit more specific or nuanced and hear a little bit about how you see this technology affecting how insurance companies might enable their different strategies from, ones that are more cost-focused to product-focused or relationship-focused. How can we see the the metaverse unlocking different strategies for those different types of insurance companies?

Simmons: Yeah, I think this is a really great point for everyone to stop and reflect in this podcast. Where is your organization and where do they lean in? If your organization goes to market mostly on a cost basis, how do you leverage the metaverse to increase value while reducing costs? If you are a product-forward organization, what are ways that you leverage the metaverse to create new products, to have differentiating products that your competitors cannot and will not be able to keep up with you? And thirdly, if you are a relationship strategy organization, how do you make meaningful deep relationships through the metaverse, which sounds challenging for sure, but how do you create those deep relationships that are meaningful to someone without maybe sitting across the desk face-to-face, and create longevity with those clients and stickiness, if you will, on their returning business and future business.

Luick: Yeah, I agree. I think there are use cases across the value chain for the industry to take advantage of with the metaverse, and I really agree with Jackie's point in that it's not one-size-fits-all, you really need to think about what is it that our organization, to use Jackie's words, is going to lead into and prioritize those areas. So for example, if you're an organization that leverages an agent experience pretty heavily, is there an opportunity in the sales cycle to leverage the metaverse? Maybe a customer will do some on some online research and have questions that come up or have things that need to be resolved, they don't understand, etcetera. Maybe there's an opportunity to have the metaverse as an interim step before that goes directly to the agent model or to an agent where obviously the cost of that sales cycle now goes up because there's human involvement.

So I think that there are opportunities throughout the cycle, but organizations are going to need to think about, where does this fit with our strategy? Where does this fit with the demographics of our customers and how do we make it work for those who want to leverage the metaverse and have a more omni-channel experience with us, but also leave the door open for those who are going to buy or expect their claims to be processed or their policy to be managed through more traditional means.

Seasongood: I agree with, and this is Shawn, I'll just add to what Jackie and Tom said, and I think they summed it up really well, but the one thing I also look at is, to Jackie’s  points, not a one size fits all but also the flexibility because it might change, the way you use meta to do home or personal lines might be different than the way you use meta to do commercial, might be different the way you do it for life and annuity. There's a lot of flexibility around this and I could see the industry taking some time to really adopt to it.

But I do think,  when you look at product disbursement and also geo, there's going to be different strategies too, a lot of insurance companies now think globally and they sell products across the globe, so what might work in North America might not be exactly what works in Europe, so there's got to be different ways of looking at it, flexible, and there's going to be some trial and error. It's going to be something like any natural evolution where it's going to take some time to get it right.

But I think the companies that invest in it early probably have a better path to being successful because I do think there will be significant trial in our era until this is really streamlined and fit for purpose for all different organizations.

Weishaupl: Shawn, you touched on a great point about how this is likely going to affect different types of insurance differently. I wonder if you guys might talk a little bit about how does that potential for change or the speed of change potentially differ for different types of insurance?

Seasongood: Well, I think, there's ways of looking at it differently. When it comes to metaverse, everybody's going to be operating in the metaverse, not just insurance companies. It's going to be a way that we function and operate going forward as a you know as a, as a civilization. There's now new assets that need to be protected associated with the metaverse. There's going to be virtual property insurance in the metaverse where individuals can buy and own virtual land, buildings and other assets, they'll have to be insured just like the real world. There’ll be virtual goods in the members, individuals can purchase goods such as clothing, accessories, digital currencies. They will also have to have insurance products associated with that. Virtual events, whether they're concerts or sporting events, again, that's another event that is costly to organize and therefore you'll have to protect against it in case it gets cancelled or any other unforeseen circumstances.

And also obviously, cyber liability insurance. As more people spend time in the metaverse, there's an increased risk of cyberattacks, just like the world we live in today with the Internet, and then obviously identity theft insurance. With the increase of virtual interactions, there is risk that somebody's identity, theft and fraud associated with somebody's, you know, metaverse identity. So all these different risks that are going to become much more important. And again, anything that has value against it, and these things are predicted to have significant value against, will have to have different insurance products that will have to be developed to protect that value going forward.

I look at that from a P&C lens. I don't know if others within the call they might be able to speak how they also see it, but I think from a product development standpoint, it's going to be pretty dynamic because you know the metaverse in itself is dynamic, so there's going to have to be some creative nuances developed within the marketplace to really protect those assets going forward.<>Simmons: Shawn, to your point earlier, if you don't know where to get golf cart insurance, I certainly don't know where to go if I want to protect the digital version of myself, right? Is it a traditional life insurance company or does PNC carry digital life, if you will? I think that will become a challenge. Is that something that's even insurable?

And then the reality is, there are a lot of fraudulent claims, to go back to a little bit to our point on the claims side. How do we even know what a fraudulent claim looks like against products that are really new to the market and we don't have a lot of data on from a claims perspective, I think it has a lot of impact into all insurance companies. I think life is maybe a little different and employee benefits might be a little different from a product perspective.

Seasongood: I think Jackie brings up a good point too about, we don't have 30 years of data associated with these new products. Traditionally insurance models, you take a lot of data through history and you're able to price and sell the products pretty successfully knowing what the future cost of claims will be. It's going to be a little bit sticky as far as the first couple of years, as you know, with these different pricing discussions around these digital assets because we don't have the data to really kind of….traditionally, we have a lots and lots of data before we make pricing decisions. So the pricing decisions around these will definitely be interesting to see how they evolve.

Luick: I agree, Shawn. I think there's a learning curve similar to what we saw with the cyber insurance market where over time things certainly tightened in that market significantly, as did the requirements placed on organizations to get a cyber policy in the first place. So I think we will see similar learning curves here because the data is just not there to support the models yet and people are going to probably in some cases find out that they were assuming more risk than they thought based on how they priced things, and they'll have to adjust.

Weishaupl: It's really fascinating thinking about this idea of the speed of technology change that we're living through, with an example of wanting data that goes back to maybe to 1993, that's a bit of kind of a funny discontinuity to think through, of how you balance that rate of change and the inherent conservativism that's needed to have that data to be able to build good predictive models that go into insurance.

So knowing that's certainly one key constraint, I'd love to know from the team here what are some of the other constraints you've observed that will likely slow the adoption of experience innovations like the metaverse.

Seasongood: Technical debt is a substantial issue for many in the industry and there's going to be a very significant investment required to capitalize on the opportunity of the metaverse and a lot of the other emerging technologies that are out there. So I think that is at baseline issue for many in the in the industry.

I think that there's some things in the metaverse that are also going to be challenging, so, for example, I don't think it's as easy in the insurance industry to define your strategy for the metaverse and your goals as it may be in, say, for example, consumer products, because the products and insurance are different, different demographics or buying insurance, etc.<>Secondly, I think it's really going to be interesting to see how many of these organizations, especially carriers, balance the metaverse with the agent experience and other sales channels.I think that's going to be very important. As we mentioned earlier, this probably isn't one-size-fits-all based on the products that you're selling and who's buying your products. So I think most carriers are going to have to really get comfortable that they understand their customer base well enough to make these types of decisions.

And then I think another key challenge would be what's the right platform in the metaverse for insurance carriers and brokers and others. And I think you know right now there's organizations in other industries that are having success with gaming platforms. Is that really going to resonate with individuals who are buying insurance versus, say, buying clothing or other consumer products? I'm not sure. So really thinking through what's a platform that's going to resonate with our constituents and our customers and our potential customers is something that's not going to be easy for a lot of organizations in this industry to figure out.

Simmons: I think it's important to remember that there are good and valid reasons why some organizations may not participate in the metaverse, or at least not immediately. There are, for example, in life insurance, a lot of life insurance organizations run 100-year liabilities and sometimes they run those on systems that are 40-50-60 years old and those products just may not make sense to implement. It's really important for an organization to step back, understand who they are, who they are in the marketplace and who they are as an organization and say, where does implementing the metaverse make sense?

If it's going to only get one kind of plug, maybe it's the employee experience, maybe the customer experience is most important. It isn't something where organizations need to run full speed into all the different facets that they could implement the metaverse because they may get so disparate in their efforts that nothing is leveraged to its full capacity and turned into a competitive advantage.<>And that's what this is really about. How do we leverage something in the metaverse as a competitive advantage for our organization. There just might be reasons why it's not the best place for all organizations to start right away.

Seasongood: I guess I'll just add that this is really early days about the metaverse. The continuing expansion is going to happen, it's inevitable. It's going to continue to be significant shifts in the way that businesses and insurance companies use the metaverse and its technology advancement. I do think it's early days. Is this a similar situation like when social media first became, you know, came on ground, we might not yet foresee all the ethical, reputational or legal risk associated with the metaverse. I immediately think of regulations and respect for social norms will be imperative, and insurers will have to ensure that people engage safely with all kinds of virtual experiences. The business of insurance is the business of risk management so again, with early days of this metaverse, it will be very interesting to see where it goes.

But I think a regulation is something that's going to be a challenge because it's going to be how these products are regulated, how the metaverse in itself is regulated. I think is a little bit early to be determined and I it will be interesting to stay close to that.

Close to 20 years ago when we first started getting social media and how people and regulation has changed over time associated with that. So I think as companies continue to wrap and develop innovations, they're going to continue to offer products to protect against those innovations, and I think the industry in itself has spent a lot of time in building that trust with policyholders and they've really worked hard to earn that trust of policyholders and consumers and it will be interesting as these things evolve that they continue to evolve in the way that they can continue to ensure that trust in a dynamic world such as the metaverse.

Weishaupl: That's really insightful as a way of looking at this domain. Tying it now to the last question. We've talked a little bit around what might come in the future, whether that's future regulations, some future risks that might may need to be insurable. I'd love to look a little bit further out, let's say 10 to 15 years. How do you see technologies like the metaverse more fundamentally, potentially changing insurance and what's insurable? How are you, and how is Protiviti looking at that notion of the future of asset protection?

Luick: It changes what's insurable in a few ways. One, there's going to be be new things, new risks that need to be insured as Shawn alluded to. I also believe that with some of this information, the way that claims are adjudicated and paid will also potentially change. For example, we talked earlier about having digital twins for automobiles in the claims process in case there was an auto accident. I wonder, and I believe at some point, the way that the IO T data comes together, other information that gets pulled into the metaverse potentially or is used in analytics around the accident, may have a big impact on how fault is determined for an accident.

So I think that as we continue to see these models evolve and these organizations learn from them, I do think that there's going to be emphasis put on, is there information that we're gleaning from the metaverse that determines whether we should pay a claim or not on existing insurance, things that we insure regularly today. So I think that there's really those two different angles. One, what are the new things that we're going to need to insure and what are the new risks that the metaverse and other emerging technologies create, and I think that's a that's a really interesting opportunity for the industry.

And then also, how do we leverage the metaverse to make sure that we are hopefully paying claims more fairly and more accurately and so forth, but it will also have an impact on decision making in the claims process on current insurance as well.

Seasongood: I think the industry is really evolving in itself beyond the metaverse. If you think about, 5-10 years from now, we'll have a lot less…we'll have, driverless cars. That's going to be a big change in the industry. There's going to be a lot of uncertainty as far as future weather patterns and climate. That's also a big change that's probably going to happen within the industry. I look at things like crypto and people actually operating and exchanging money through crypto currencies and exchanges. That's also a big change in industry. I think the industry in itself is evolving. It's really hard to predict what it's going to look like in the next 5 to 10 to 15 years because of all the underlying changes, but you throw metaverse in there, it's it's, it's another situation that's probably going to be, you know, I don't know if it will be a disruptor, but it'll be definitely something that will be helping the insurance company of the future really trying to manage these new and evolving risks, and it's going to be interesting to see, you know, how that all plays itself out.

I've been in insurance now 20 years. I cannot see the next 10 to 15 years in insurance looking anything like it did the last 10 to 20 years, so it definitely seems to be part of the overall evolution. As far more to come, maybe even two years’ time, we might have more clarity as far as how the metaverse will play… definitely we know it's going to play a big impact, I guess just to the to the extent and where it all fits within that evolution, I'm not sure.

Weishaupl: This was a great conversation today. Thanks, Shawn, Jackie, Tom. Now back to you, Joe.

Kornik: Thanks, Alex, and thank you for listening to the VISION by Protiviti podcast. Please be sure to rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and don't miss all the metaverse content we have at vision.protiviti.com. On behalf of Jackie, Tom, Shawn, and Alex. I'm Joe Kornik. We'll see you next time.