A Scenario Planning For Interbank Payments And Decentralized Ledger Platforms

Cross-border payments nowadays take place through slow and expensive correspondent banking. Decentralized Ledger Platforms (DLPs) might bring change by offering a payments backbone which requires no central trusted party. Examples of such DLPs are Ripple, Stellar, Hyperledger and Open Transactions, which are all follow-ups of the disruptive Bitcoin protocol. Financial institutions are not eager to adopt the Bitcoin, but the technology behind the Bitcoin itself, the blockchain, is promising and of future value. Many uncertainties arise by outlining how exactly these DLPs might change the financial industry of the future. Therefore, this research tries to understand what DLP-facilitated future interbank payments look like and gains this understanding by means of scenario planning. This leads to the following research question: What are future scenarios for the implementation of decentralized ledger platforms facilitating interbank payments? The scenario planning is fed by an elaborate research of literature about organizational adoption of radical innovations, the current way of carrying out interbank payments, crypto currencies and DLPs. The scenario planning itself consists of trends, uncertainties and dynamics, which are thought of and verified by a multitude of stakeholders and experts from different backgrounds and industries. Scenarios are created and underlying findings are discussed.