Mark Carney, Former BoE and BoC Governor, Joins Stripe Board of Directors

After leading the way in digital currency innovation at the Bank of England, or BoE, Mark Carney has officially joined the Board of Directors of Stripe – a company committed to creating new solutions for commerce for the Internet.

Stripe introduced Carney as a 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 vast experience in global financial systems and governance,” especially when deploying new climate efforts.

“The very nature of commerce has changed over the past decade,” Carney said. “Stripe has been at the forefront of delivering 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 next few years as they build the global infrastructure that enables the internet to become the engine of strong and inclusive economic growth.”

Founded in 2011, Stripe promotes itself as a comprehensive payment processing platform for e-commerce and other forms of online commerce. The company first tried Bitcoin (BTC) in 2014 before rolling out BTC payments the following year. However, Stripe would end up dropping the BTC feature in 2018 due to high fees and slow confirmation times. In October 2019, Stripe also dropped the Facebook-backed Libra project, which has since been renamed 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 payment systems are still evolving.

Carney also expressed a favorable view of 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 the global reserve currency.

“The question is open whether such a new synthetic hegemonic currency would be better provided by the public sector, perhaps through a network of central bank digital currencies,” he said at the time.

Carney was dismissed for nearly a year from his post as governor of the BoE. Under his seven-year tenure, the central bank tackled the economic consequences of Brexit and the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.