How to spot someone from Deutsche Bank in the metaverse
If you have so far steered clear of the metaverse in the belief that it mostly appeals to teenagers in virtual reality headsets or middle-aged men masquerading as nubile young women, you might want to give it another go. Since you last looked, the metaverse has become quite the thing: companies are out there hiring chief metaverse officers and based on the average of the esteemed reckonings of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, McKinsey & Co and Citi, the new digital playground will be worth $8 trillion in eight years’ time.
Given that the metaverse is a bit like reality, but in a pixelated form without the full suite of sensory stimuli, it will inevitably contain bankers. How will you know them? Fortunately, Deutsche Bank’s newish report on the metaverse and its myriad market opportunities offers some pointers.
The authors of the DB report have included the following helpful headshots of themselves IRL alongside their selves in the metaverse. There are definite similarities (hair colour), but for the most part, the metaverse selves are younger, fresher, cooler versions of their originals.
While it might be difficult to extrapolate from this and assume that any young, cool, shiny-faced person in the metaverse is from Deutsche Bank’s digital assets team, it does seem reasonable to conceive that the metaverse will be a cool place for bankers to hang out because they’ll get to inhabit some hip alter egos.
That’s not all. The authors of the Deutsche Bank report predict that people will be able to spend NFTs in the metaverse in a way that triggers purchases in reality (as per the example below). Financial intermediaries will be needed in the metaverse (PayPal, American Express and and Mastercard are there already). The metaverse is a “gamechanger” declared Deutsche Bank. M&A deals may one day be hatched there too, presumably by the cool guy in shades standing by the giant pixelated sneaker.
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