Your questions answered on blockchain technology, which could revolutionise the payments settlements landscape...and more.
Blockchain, the latest buzzword in financial services, has the potential to revolutionise the way transactional information is stored, shared and used. The driving factors causing companies to invest millions of euro into developing the technology are:
- cost and speed: blockchain can reduce or eliminate the need for certain intermediaries and can be used to automate manual tasks;
- security: interfering with transactions on the blockchain is extremely difficult due to the complex cryptography employed and also the distributed nature of the ledger – every participant in the blockchain can view any changes; and
- provenance and traceability: a distributed ledger stores the entire ownership history of an asset (today mostly Bitcoins but information on other assets can be stored).
Sounds simple enough and yet we are being asked the same questions about blockchain technology time and again: What is it, where did it come from and why is it important?
