David Burt, the Premier and Minister of Finance, has travelled to San Francisco to meet Coinbase, Circle and other fintech-connected companies discussing his goal to establish Bermuda as a fintech “sandbox”.

His stated plan is to create an onchain economy for Bermuda, the next phase of digital transformation built on blockchain and automation.

Before flying out, he told a group of business people at Monday’s Chamber of Commerce Budget Breakfast, moderated by PwC: “There'll be a future...[when] taxes will be filed automatically. People will be paid, the tax will be filed automatically. Everything will go. I mean, that's the reality. That is the digital future, the future of digital finance, of which we're going towards.”

Analysts say we are already in the early stages of the new economic infrastructure that could mean, for example, being paid for goods or paid a salary without the use of banks in the traditional way.

The same way the introduction of the internet led to a revolution in communication and business, onchain is expected to change the world.

The Premier told the gathering that the message he was taking to California was that if companies such as Circle and Coinbase build a Bermuda onchain economy, the Government would commit funds to support it.

He said his message was: “We will not just ask for your money. We will match the money. We want Bermuda to be seen as the example of how you build. And that's been the positioning of Bermuda that has worked very well for us.

“We know that you're not going to come into this market to make money off our 65,000 people. But what we know is that we can be a place where you can test, show, and demonstrate how this works. You can scale that up for the rest of the world. That is something that works for them.”

The Premier said the world was moving towards a digital economy with various new payment options.

He said: “We still feel that we're left behind. We have the opportunity to catch up and lead. That is what this is all about and that's why I think it's important that we press ahead.”

Meanwhile, the rapid advance of artificial intelligence means the Government cannot stop there.

The Premier said: “The Ministry of Finance is actually commissioning an economist to study the dynamics of what [effect] artificial intelligence would have on our particular economy so we actually know what it is that we're dealing with. There are some people that would (doubt) an economy like ours, which has more jobs than we have people.

“(But) there could be a net overall benefit. We want to see what that actually looks like.

“So we are retaining an economist who is actually going to study those particular items and then report back.”