Former BoE, BoC governor Mark Carney joins Stripe board of directors

Mark Carney, one of the most prominent central bankers of the post-financial crisis era, has officially joined the digital payments company. Stripe has all but abandoned cryptocurrency payment solutions for the time being, but its founders are positive about the emerging industry.

After paving the way for digital currency innovation at the Bank of England, or BoE, Mark Carney has officially joined the board of directors at Stripe — a company that’s committed to building new commerce solutions for the internet. 

Stripe introduced Carney as board member on Sunday, where he joins Christa Davies, Diane Greene, Jonathan Chadwick, Sir Michael Moritz and Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison. The U.S. digital payments company says it will benefit from Carney’s “extensive experience of global financial systems and governance,” especially as it rolls out new climate efforts.

“The very nature of commerce has changed over the past decade,” Carney said. “Stripe has been at the forefront of enabling this new digital economy, providing innovative and resilient global payment solutions to businesses large and small.”

He continued:

“I look forward to supporting Stripe over the coming years as they build the global infrastructure that enables the internet to become the engine for strong and inclusive economic growth.”

Founded in 2011, Stripe markets itself as a complete payment processing platform for e-commerce and other forms of online business. The company first dabbled in Bitcoin (BTC) in 2014 before rolling out BTC payments the following year. However, Stripe would eventually drop BTC functionality in 2018 over high fees and slow confirmation times. In October 2019, Stripe also abandoned the Facebook-backed Libra project, which has since been rebranded to Diem.

Although Stripe has given up on Bitcoin payments, for now, co-founder John Collison has expressed a positive attitude towards the future of cryptocurrencies, especially in emerging markets where payments systems are still evolving.

Carney has also expressed a favorable view towards digital assets, especially those backed by central banks. At the 2019 Jackson Hole Symposium, Carney envisioned a future where a central bank digital currency, or CBDC, could replace the U.S. dollar as global reserver currency.

“It is an open question whether such a new Synthetic Hegemonic Currency would be best provided by the public sector, perhaps through a network of central bank digital currencies,” he said at the time.

Carney is almost one-year removed from his post as BoE governor. Under his seven-year tenure, the central bank tackled the economic consequences of Brexit and the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.