Hello and welcome to another MLEX podcast. I'm Sam Wilkin, Brussels managing editor, and today

we're talking about Libra, the new cryptocurrency backed by Facebook. It's supposed to give consumers

access to easy payments across platforms and across borders, but it has already attracted a barrage of

regulatory questions highlighting concerns from competition to privacy to money laundering. I'm joined by

Jack Schickler, our financial services reporter here in Brussels to talk us through all the implications.

Hi Jack. Hi. First of all, what is Libre exactly and what's it supposed to do?

Well, that's a very good question.

And a lot of regulators around the world would really like to know.

In principle, it's been branded as a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and the other things that

we're familiar with.

In reality, it seems the main objective

is to have a cheaper payment system that gets around high bank charges. But a lot of regulators

have been scratching their heads about exactly what it will look like. And they're not quite

sure because there's not a huge amount of detail out there. It could fall into, within the EU jurisdiction, for example,

there are questions about whether it falls in anti-money laundering rules,

whether it falls into EU rules on market instruments that can be traded like stocks and shares,

or whether it falls under the definition of what they call e-money. And this was an area

that regulators were looking at already. They were already worried about investor protection issues,

people getting ripped off buying Bitcoin or new assets that are like Bitcoin that look like

little more than pyramid schemes.

But obviously the intervention of one of the world's largest companies raises a whole new

bunch of issues.

...