Background & Biography
He joined the governing board after heading the institution’s economics department. Earlier posts concerned financial operations and risk, alongside a period at the European monetary authority. His academic training culminated in an economics doctorate. His current work spans public digital currency development and operational oversight.
In November 2018, he explained how the institution was reorganising to respond to digitalisation. Bringing payment oversight, development and the supply of physical currency into one department connected innovation with continuity. A separate organisational change combined data resources and information technology. He framed these changes around improving analysis and recognising risks, rather than acquiring technology for its own sake. His account also resisted treating declining cash use as a reason to neglect people who still depended on it. The resulting perspective joins the development of new payment methods to accessibility and contingency planning. These were organisational decisions involving the institution collectively.
Notable Contributions
In an October 2021 address, he argued that public digital money, often abbreviated CBDC, required a different approach to experimentation from that of a startup. A new monetary instrument needed evidence that it was safe, met its purpose and avoided serious side effects. He also identified a problem of expectations: a proposed currency could attract demands that were incompatible with one another. Anonymity and preventing illicit transfers illustrated that tension. His position combined strong privacy with protection for the functioning of monetary policy and the stability of finance. These were conditions he placed on a possible introduction, rather than assurances that a particular implementation had already passed those tests.
A March 2022 presentation to Nordea executives made the design choices more concrete. He presented the digital euro as an instrument for spending, with safeguards intended to discourage its use for accumulating large balances. Possible measures included caps on holdings and less favourable returns above a threshold. The presentation also allocated a substantial role to supervised businesses: registering customers, conducting checks against financial crime, providing interfaces and handling support. Public institutions would provide the underlying transaction service, leaving room for competing commercial offerings. He considered both an account model and a form that stored value in the payment instrument. Reusing existing instant transfer infrastructure offered a possible way to draw on tested systems and reduce investment. These slides described options during investigation; they do not establish the features of a subsequently approved currency.
His September 2021 simulator remarks connected payment innovation to a specific analytical challenge. Moving from transactions processed in batches to transfers settled individually and immediately would change the liquidity questions researchers needed to investigate. He described work by the institution’s specialists and the availability of a renewed simulation tool, rather than claiming the research or software as his own. He also distinguished the balances banks already held for settlement from a potential digital currency available to the public. Existing experience analysing the former would not remove the need for new quantitative work on the latter. The relevance of simulation was therefore practical: changing who could hold and transfer public money could create additional analytical requirements.
Why Katharos.ai Follows Tuomas Välimäki
His June 2026 remarks in Seoul addressed tokenisation within the wider organisation of money. He described a system in which public institutions provide the asset for ultimate settlement while regulated private firms supply much of the credit and payment service. Representing deposits and other assets digitally, using programmable agreements and changing settlement arrangements could improve speed, transparency and international transfers. But he made those possibilities conditional on safeguards. Payments needed a dependable point of completion; money needed to retain the same value across issuers and technologies; privacy and access also mattered. The editorial interest is in how he connects technical possibilities to institutional requirements. In this account, a new way of recording or transferring value does not remove the need for reliable money or accountable operation.
In May 2026, he linked the concentration of everyday payments to vulnerability when conditions deteriorate. His case for alternatives included a prospective digital euro usable in shops, online, between people and without a network connection. He also stressed that participation by merchants was necessary for an alternative network to become useful. In the same speech, he viewed stablecoins primarily as instruments within the crypto economy at that time, rather than established tools for ordinary purchases. He pointed to Pontes as an effort to settle technologically new assets using public money. Together, these remarks connect his digital finance relevance to payment architecture and adoption. They are dated assessments and project aims, not evidence that a pilot or public rollout has since occurred.
Areas to Follow
- Dependable completion of transactions on new settlement systems.
- Merchant participation and offline payment alternatives.
- Testing where funds move when new monetary instruments emerge.
- Liquidity analysis as transfers become immediate.
Reporting Scope
Reviewed on 11 October 2026, this profile distinguishes current responsibilities from dated proposals. It attributes personal arguments separately from projects and research delivered by wider institutional teams.
Areas of Influence
At the research gathering he opened in August 2025, he proposed a more focused research agenda for changing forms of money. Digital public currency and stablecoins linked to the dollar were attracting attention, but agreement that they could affect the movement of funds did not mean agreement about the direction or scale of those effects. He suggested using simulation to investigate the differences. His explanation also identified practical uses for these tools: examining liquidity requirements, behaviour during disruptions and the effects of different ways to complete transactions without imposing those experiments on a live system. He encouraged participants to question their premises and share practical experience. This is influence through convening and setting analytical priorities, with computational results interpreted alongside a broader understanding of the system.
His September 2023 account of emergency preparations added an operational dimension. He distinguished protecting an individual firm’s continuity from maintaining essential services across a network. The national arrangements he described separated backup accounts for customers and card functions from a fallback for transfers between banks. Responsibility for maintaining the components and deciding when to activate them was divided between public authorities. Banks also needed preparations of their own to use the facilities, while the arrangements required participation by essential retailers. His discussion made clear that restoring access after a technical disruption was different from a bank resolution process. He concluded that a prospective digital euro should provide payment routes operationally independent of established networks. That connects his resilience argument to concrete dependencies, rather than assuming that adding another interface automatically creates an independent alternative.
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