The Federal Reserve payments innovation conference is livestreaming now

The Federal Reserve’s first Payments Innovation Conference was held on October 21, 2025 and was livestreamed publicly on the Fed’s website and YouTube. The event was framed as a forum for the central bank and private-sector leaders to discuss how new technologies are reshaping the payments system, with Governor Christopher J. Waller saying he wanted to examine technologies emerging from the crypto and DeFi worlds and how they are entering the mainstream payments ecosystem. The conference focused on four main themes: the convergence of traditional finance and decentralized finance, stablecoin use cases and business models, artificial intelligence in payments, and tokenization of financial products and services. Waller also used the event to outline a policy idea he called a "payment account," intended to give legally eligible institutions basic Federal Reserve payment services even if they currently rely on a third-party bank with a master account. The broader significance is that the Fed is publicly engaging with digital assets, tokenization, and AI not as speculative trends, but as operational questions about payment rails, settlement, and access to central bank services.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

More coverage

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