Monty Munford has 15 years of writing experience with Forbes and other publications. Now he is a venture partner at 7BC.vc and ARYZE has interviewed him about the future of tech.
Monty Munford has consulted for Paramount Digital Entertainment in LA and Liverpool FC in the UK. He was also an actor and Bollywood villain in two big movies as well as a publisher for Forbes.
Now he is involved with 7BC.vc which is venture capital fund exclusively focused on supporting Artificial Intelligence, FinTech, and Blockchain technologies. Their mission is to leverage the power of capital, the network and technology to back teams disrupting industries and solving the global problems.
Why was 7BC.vc founded?
“7BC was founded for a number of reasons. The first is that although digital transformation and the sharing economy has taken the world by storm over the last 20 years, it has been incredible at sharing, transferring and transmitting data and information, but not at transmitting and transferring value.
The second reason is that without targetted capital investments into innovations at a protocol level that really aims at connecting systems, and focusing far too much on applications, the entire objective of the model of what economies and industries will look like is ultimately lost.
The third is that we wanted to take a holistic approach across a broad and yet still focused mandate at a technological layer across AI, blockchain, decentralised technologies and Fintech within the financial sector, particularly where the financial sector has welcomed, in parts digital transformation, but is nascent when it comes to actual digitalisation where value itself is becoming digital.
Across all of this, it becomes clear that we are thinking about what global and local economies will turn into and our focus is on what underpins those futures that prioritise security, resilience and optimise efficiencies.”
Why is AI, blockchain and fintech the future? What are the possibilities? How do you see the future?
“There are disparate alternatives of what the future can look like. However, from a trend standpoint, we know that barriers to entry into the financial sector continue to lower as technology innovations come to the market. As such, the financial sector is becoming more integrated with other sectors and industries within the sharing economy, particularly around healthcare, travel, identity and much more.
The second is that we view blockchain as the digital underpinning for applications that are built and that use other technologies such as AI, IoT and much more. There have been barriers to the successful deployment of many of these technologies and often it comes down to where the data is, how is it being collected, and is it being used well in a connected and secure environment, particularly when it is now more valuable than gold.
We find that changing the narrative and focusing on building blocks positions us well from a narrative standpoint to build a robust, disruptive and transformational portfolio of companies with both a unique advantage and a unique selling point and differentiator. The future is one that will be even more connected, even more automated, and even more digital, that is all we can be certain of.”
Monty Munford is an author for the Economist and the BBC. If you wish to know more about Monty Munford, follow him on his Twitter account or connect with him on LinkedIn.