Managing Editor
American Banker
Paul Vigna is the managing editor of American Banker. He has been a journalist for more than three decades, mostly with The Wall Street Journal, where he began covering bitcoin in 2013, one of the first mainstream reporters to do so. His coverage was instrumental in bringing awareness of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to professional, business-oriented audiences. Along with Michael Casey, he published “The Age of Cryptocurrency” in 2015, the first book about bitcoin from a Big Five publisher. They followed it up with “The Truth Machine” in 2018.
He was featured in two documentaries about crypto: “Banking on Bitcoin” (2016) and “Bitcoin: The End of Money as We Know It” (2015).
He has also published “The Almightier: How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin” (2025) and “Guts: The Anatomy of The Walking Dead” (2017).
Legacy cores were not built for a world of continuous settlement and programmable money. As payments accelerate toward real-time and financial products become logic-driven, banks face a fundamental question: can existing infrastructure evolve—or must it be replaced?
This session explores how leading institutions are rethinking ledger architecture to support T+0 settlement, 24/7 operations, and condition-based transactions. From tokenized deposits to modern core overlays, executives will examine what it takes to move from batch processing to intelligent, real-time financial systems—and where to start.
On-chain finance promises to address all three structural failures at once: Tokenized receivables to unlock instant liquidity; programmable infrastructure to unify fragmented systems; and real-time data to expand access to capital.
But the promise of on-chain is not the same as widespread adoption by small businesses. This panel examines whether on-chain finance fundamentally changes how small businesses access and manage capital—or simply improves existing models with new rails. The discussion will include: