Jim Ford

Jim has served in the payments industry for over forty years. Learning his craft in the very practical world of back office operations he then moved into more strategic roles from the mid 1990s. Amongst other roles he served on the clearing committee of the ECU Banking Association, the forerunner of the Euro Banking Association. He also served on numerous working groups of CLS Bank and assisted in its creation. In his roles with HSBC and NatWest he was their payments industry liaison executive helping to drive thought leadership in numerous areas including PSD 1 & 2, SEPA, Faster Payments and cheque clearing changes. In 2015 he helped drive the UK ring fencing project at HSBC, assisting in the allocation of sort codes between the ring-fenced and non-ring-fenced bank as well as arranging the on-boarding of the ring-fenced bank into certain UK infrastructures.

Since 2014 Jim has been increasingly involved in Blockchain developments as well as developments in central bank digital currencies. He is a member of the Whitechapel Think Tank Plenary Council and a member of its Future of Payments Working Group. In this capacity he contributed to a major paper presented to the House of Lords on the future implications for Blockchain in the UK. He also worked on a major paper for the central banks of Singapore and Canada on the impacts of a cross border Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) on global payments.

More recently he is a founding member of the Digital Pound Foundation (DPF) which was set up in 2021 to lobby for and educate on the creation of a CBDC in the UK, He is part of the DPF Steering Committee and has published blogs on the payments related impacts of a CBDC. He also co-authored the DPF responses to CBDC consultations from the Bank Of England and the House of Lords. He has also been invited to join the European of the DPF which is the Digital Euro Association.