Over the horizon: Blockchain and the future of financial infrastructure

The transformation of the financial services industry is top-of-mind for everyone in the field. As digitization has “changed the game” for all industry sectors, distributed ledger technology, also known as blockchain, has emerged as a hot topic. But how can this technology help financial firms? This report from Deloitte and World Economic Forum takes a pragmatic approach to answering this question.

The report builds upon the findings from the Deloitte and World Economic Forum report, Disruptive Innovation in Financial Services, and looks at the implications of distributed ledger technology across nine functions of financial services. Our findings suggest this technology has the potential to “live-up to the hype” and reshape financial services, but requires careful collaboration from other emerging technologies, regulators, incumbents, and additional stakeholders to be successful.

Key findings include:

• Distributed ledger technology has the potential to drive simplicity and efficiency by establishing new financial services infrastructure and processes
• Distributed ledger technology will form the foundation of next generation financial services infrastructure in conjunction with other existing and emerging technologies
• Similar to technological advances in the past, new financial services infrastructure will transform and question foundational orthodoxies to today’s business models
• The most impactful distributed ledger technology use cases will require deep collaboration between incumbents, innovators and regulators, adding complexity and delaying implementation horizon

The report is centred on use case deep-dives that consider how distributed ledger technology could benefit each scenario. How could your business benefit from blockchain?