Now is the time to get past the blockchain hype and into the nitty-gritty of how to use it to improve banking, writes Chuck Mackie in “Blockchain on the Brink: Report from the DTCC Blockchain Conference.” It may well be five years before blockchain has a major impact on existing processes and institutions, and much of the focus on financial incumbents is problematic. As Mackie concludes, “While DTCC, R3, DAH, IBM and others will have a big impact on the implementation of distributed ledger technology in the financial services industry, it is likely that the truly disruptive changes such as those that have already hit bookstores (Amazon), hotels (AirBnB), and transportation (Uber) will come from companies that we may not have heard from yet.” And do blockchain technology and banks factor into a digital identity?, asks Bryan Yurcan in American Banker. For one thing, banks could act as authenticators, he writes. But doing so means banks would have to cooperate and share data as well as get their security strategy in order.
FinTech Rising
Reports at the intersection of money, banking, securities, and payments with digital technologies