As LendIt Fintech, to be the largest Fintech technology event in the world, you not only require a large number of sponsors or invited people, you need to offer your guests the highest quality of information, so it requires the best of the best in terms of innovative technologies.
As we have explained above, participating in this event is an honor, because you receive all the attention of the public, investors and sister companies; imagine having a presentation dedicated only to you. For this reason, it fills us with pleasure that the technology that unified us here today has its own presentation during the event, referring to the paper: “Is Blockchain technology ready for production in financial services?”.
This panel was held on the second day of the event, being one of the most important we have covered here in CryptoTendence. It was made by Mark Smith representative of Symbiont, Ryan Rugg representative of R3, Corey Davis representative of BTIG, Oli Harris representative of JP Morgan Chase, with the moderation of a member organizer of the event, Jason Jones. Only by seeing the quality of the speakers that we meet, we can see how impressive this talk was.
Panel on Blockchain technology in financial services, LendIt Fintech 2019, San Francisco
They began by highlighting the most powerful qualities of the Blockchain technology, which attracted the attention of a variety of Fintech area developers, being able to be totally decentralized and maintain its quality of being unmodifiable.
This has allowed us to discuss a new possibility to overcome the existing security and transparency limitations, using as an example in the insurance area. To such point of interest has generated, that banks and powerful financial companies by their massive number of clients and years of experience, like JP Morgan Chase, have begun to consider and design projects with this technology.
However, they emphasize that to date all idea of using Blockchain had been maintained in research and controlled tests, since they must first understand the potential use of this new technology, considering that they had never worked with it and it has slippery soil in legal terms.
They admit that there has been a certain level of skepticism, but it has healthy levels, allowing fruitful research. This behavior is based on the fact that if their money were at risk, they could act differently, but the money they work with is that of their investors, which is why they must first ensure their safety.
They link this idea with cryptocurrencies, making it known that they may be interested in the concept of these decentralized tokens that can revolutionize the market. But the problem of volatility puts at risk the value of the investments that their clients placed, which can affect their confidence and generally harm the market, investors and bankers.
Then the balance between the passion of wanting to innovate, but with the vision of first diminishing the risk of loss, have been able to reach the point where the projects begin to be realized, be it with services available to the market or tests beyond a simulation. They clarify that to reach this point they have had to make a series of modifications to meet the conditions mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph.
Later the moderator asks the question, “we know that the insurance market is slow, Blockchain can act in these conditions?”. Being the response of the speakers that effectively the Blockchain technology may impact positively in this market, mainly for that quality of transparency and store information in an unchangeable way, thus achieving a way to reduce suspicions or problems of trust between agents, being public offer of insurers, seeking to reflect that they are fair or not, and the quality of the insured, seeking to separate the liars from the honest. Concluding that effectively this market will make modifications.
At this point the moderator asks the central question of this paper, exposing a series of services that are being associated with Blockchain, such as automated payment services, how to store data and make other existing services more efficient. Associating this question with the implicit need to replace the old technologies.
They start by emphasizing that it depends on the services that your company or bank offers, using as an example a company that is in charge of developing the software to work or generate new financial markets, for which, for this case, the technology is clearly prepared and waiting for it to arrive.
The innovation that comes with it is the evolution of platforms, smart contracts, improved payment methods. It highlights that an important difference that happens right now is that the last technology suffered trust problems, with respect to data management, this being one of the solutions that Blockchain provides.
However, there is a part that can be discouraging for many passionate people, since they still consider total decentralization as something utopian, given that a central point will always be required to work. They even highlight that thanks to the Blockchain technology they have managed to unify the information stored in the same places, being the information chain, allowing to get rid of the infinity of paperwork that previously required a simple financial action.
They conclude with the idea that the development of Blockchain technology is just beginning, highlighting that there is still a way to go. They raise the idea that payment services can still evolve beyond Fiat money, giving cryptocurrencies a chance, as JP Morgan Chase is doing with its own token, which will serve as a currency of the company’s network.
Also published on Medium.