INSIGHTS FROM THE BLACK SWAN FINANCE & TECHNOLOGY SUMMIT 2025
The inaugural Black Swan Summit was hosted by GFTN (Global Finance & Technology Network) at the beautiful Winthrop Hall at the University of Western Australia in Perth between March 24th and 26th.
The conference theme was ‘At the Edge of Tomorrow’ Machine, Money, and Humanity.
Several of the event participants were given the opportunity before the main event proceedings started to participate in a tour of the CSIRO Pawsey Supercomputing centre.
This is where Setonix, the Southern Hemispheres largest Quantum computer resides, providing some 300,000 laptops worth of compute power.
Some of the biggest research and innovation challenges are being answered by this type of technology, such as, how does cancer start?
The conference content was different to the typical fintech and payments conference, posing deeper questions around how we responsibly manage AI, provide the renewable energy we need in the future and build compute power for outcomes that benefit humanity.
It was noted how Perth is strategically positioned in the same time zone as Singapore with a 600 million ASEAN market to serve.
It was evident there is lots of opportunity in Perth with already 140 space companies located in the state of Western Australia and subsea cabling growth to Asia expanding 400-fold in the last ten years.
There were many sessions on how we responsibly manage AI, as software is soon going to be talking like human beings. Responsible management and usage of AI is something I am extremely passionate about as we further build out www.transformsales.ai
One panel participant even provocatively posed the thought, maybe the world is better without humans?
Another senior academic asked maybe we should be considering what we as humans want to create?
On the topic of emerging money, the growth of USDT/USDC stablecoins were highlighted as a way of more cost effectively handling international payments and aligning a company cost base to revenues.
There was an excellent session on how the U$300 trillion global property industry is being changed by tokenised assets. With most of these funds ‘locked’ up by homeowners around the world.
However, U$75 trillion of this real estate is invested commercially in properties such as hotels. With 26% of this U$75 trillion equity, secure tokens can unlock ~ U$20 trillion of assets and allow consumers to have fractionalised ownership of a hotel or investment portfolio of hotels.
This is the first time the average investor has been able to access this asset class and own a portfolio of global hotel and REIT real estate.
Typically, high end real estate investment has been the domain of Donald Trump type characters and high nett worth individuals in the top 5% of global wealth.
Overall, this inaugural conference was an excellent event and made many of the attendees think, how do we strategically play our cards now to leverage the machines and money for the betterment of humanity.
