Those businesses who flog Blockchain tech in the financial services market are going to clean up, according to a new market intelligence report by BIS Research.
The report with the catchy title ‘Blockchain Technology in Financial Services Market – Analysis and Forecast: 2017 to 2026’ , claims blockchain could lead to a per-year cost savings of $6-8 billion in KYC/AML, $30-40 billion in trade finance, and $50-60 billion in capital markets.
Blockchain is seen as one of the most disruptive technologies to hit a number of industries including financial sector. This is being driven mainly by the increasing need to acknowledge the inefficiencies in the existing technologies and processes in the industry and increasing mistrust of the consumers in the financial services market, post-2008 economic recession.
For those who came in late, a blockchain is a distributed digital database that records and maintains a list of all transactions taking place in real time.
Each blockchain record is time stamped and stored cryptographically, which is tamper-proof and immutable. While the use cases of this technology are largely being explored across different industries such as healthcare, real estate, media and travel, and hospitality among others, the financial institutions have been the front runners in the development of blockchain technology and have already implemented a host of successful use cases, ranging from pre-IPO trading platform released by NASDAQ to cross-border payment platform created by Ripple.
By cutting out the middlemen and increasing the efficiency, blockchain is anticipated to cut the transaction and infrastructure costs by over 50 percent for finance companies. Consequentially, leading financial institutions and banks, including Citibank, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Barclays among others, have all taken the steps to deploy the technology.
Due to the large scale investments being poured into the blockchain technology by venture capitalists, financial institutions and private equity firms, hundreds of start-ups have emerged in this space, spanning across use cases such as cross-border payments, supply chain management, trade finance, asset management, capital market post-trade solutions, identity and authentication, insurance, and lending among others.
The potential of various benefits such as cost-cuts, the elimination of intermediaries, the increased transparency and security among others, presented by this technology have impelled the companies to explore the technology. The financial push from financial monoliths coupled with the rising support from governments and central banks across countries are the key factors driving the growth of the blockchain technology.
According to BIS Research Analyst Shazlie Khan: “The blockchain technology could save the financial institutions over $40 billion per year in infrastructure, IT, operational, third party fee, and administrative personnel costs.”
The blockchain industry witnessed a pivotal change for the future of its market in June 2017, when this technology entered into the mainstream financial services, with IBM building blockchain for seven of Europe’s biggest banks, which are Deutsche Bank, HSBC, KBC, Natixis, Rabobank, Societe Generale and Unicredit, in the area of trade finance. This agreement marks one of the first real-world use cases of blockchain technology in financial services, and will pave the way for further development and expansion of the blockchain technology market across the globe.
The report presents an in-depth analysis of the various factors governing the growth of the market in addition to the Porter’s five forces analysis, gauging the competitive attractiveness of the industry. The key strategies and developments segment has been added in the report to provide the readers with the recent strategic activities of the leading industry players in the market.
