Great guest post by Fiona Reilly who recently attended the Blockchain for Finance event in Dublin for us.
The opening statement from Jeremy Wilson, Barclays set the tone at the recent Blockchain for Finance Dublin conference where representatives from Fintech, Banking, Legal and Regulatory gathered to discuss both current progress of the technology and future opportunities.
The keystone technology is making people think about how we can design new ways of interacting, the common theme of the conference indicated that there is much collaboration and partnership happening both within industry but also amongst the blockchain technology community. There are many use cases in development which are were not there 12 months ago and this work is not limited to the private sector, there is also aggressive development happening in the public space. A number of PoCs were described across different use cases: syndicated loans, payments/settlements, trade finance and fund distribution with a particularly interesting presentation from Guillaume Andre, Banque de France.
There were excellent panel discussions on the potential of the single ledger with smart contracts which combines business processes, computer science and legal with the power to exchange information at a transactional level in near real time. Within the Financial Service industry there is work to go to move from the old model but according to Emmanuel Aidoo, Credit Suisse the dimerisation of assets into digital and blockchain will drive this development faster. A host of new technologies such as Cloud computing, Robotics, Machine learning and Mobile first are coming together and working in an integrated fashion building new processes around areas like KYC. There were some broader discussions on topics such as how people will conduct financial transactions in the future across a confluence of technologies, particularly Millennials conducting banking transactions.
Issues such as interoperability, identification, compliance and regulation, governance/stewardship and scalability were also covered by industry leaders like Brian Behlendorf, Hyperledger and Brian McNulty R3. Leading innovators in the technology including IOTA, Tieto, Stellar, Saga, CrowdWiz and, HedgeToken were represented.
Although the tone of the event was largely that of optimism, there were a number of participants who also had their concerns about the technology. At the moment there are more questions than answers as to how legal frameworks will adjust to the capabilities of blockchain such as the commercial detail in a smart contracts, dispute resolution and admissibility in court. Anne-Marie Bohan, Matheson suggests that the use case will be delayed for legal rather than technological reasons. A number of discussions referred to Regulation, Oliver Naegele, founder and CEO of Blockchain Helix indicated that the Regulator is neutral to the technology, the interest is in the protections and processes for the participants.
Whilst Blockchain is forecast to become the “beating heart” of the global financial system, panel speakers views were that non-financial solutions may not move as quickly. If this technology is to have fundamental impacts on business and social models there are major moral and ethical considerations, the heart of this technology is the sharing of data on a very significant scale, trust is the keypin. The general opinion of attendees is that the hype is warranted but there is some way to go, the takeaway message from the conference was that we ‘cannot afford not to be engaged’.
These are the two slides we covered at #blockchaineu in closing today. pic.twitter.com/kUF16X3huM
— ᖴIᑎTEᑕᕼ IᖇEᒪᗩᑎᗪ 🇮🇪 (@FinTechIreland) October 4, 2017
