Financial Institutions flock to blockchain technology, while bitcoin divides opinions

Investment in financial technology companies trebled last year, providing a hint of the scale of digital disruption banks face. According to research from Accenture, the total amount invested in the global fintech sector rose from just over $4bn, in 2013, to more than $12bn last year, as record amounts were poured into companies developing technologies that promise to turn the financial sector on its head.

Investments into blockchain tech companies has already exceeded the 2014 total, and many of the world’s biggest banks have publicly stated an interest in exploring the use of blockchain technology. R3 CEV has put together a consortium of at least 22 different megabanks, that intend to explore distributed ledger technologies, while Blythe Master’s Digital Asset Holdings is exploring private blockchain solutions.

"Wall Street is wisely exploring blockchain technology — about 20 banks have gone public about it, and my sense is that there are another 100 hiring teams, learning, experimenting, testing and engaging in the space — at this stage I can’t imagine a single CTO on Wall Street that doesn’t have the word ‘blockchain’ on their whiteboard."
— – Matthew Roszak, Tally Capital Founding Partner

Accenture expects banks to take advantage of permissioned distributed ledgers for almost instantaneous settlement of currency, equity, and fixed income trades, which will drive efficiency and potentially create new asset classes.

The sentiment is mirrored in a HSBC Corporate Insights report, produced in partnership with a leading research and advisory firm specialising in the Financial Services industry, Celent.

“Corporate banks are abuzz with Blockchain’s potential and innumerable experiments are underway. The speed with which banks have taken notice has been breathtaking: six months ago the topic was just beginning to be seriously discussed. This willingness to embrace the new is extraordinarily encouraging.”
— – Gareth Lodge, Celent Senior Analyst

Several factors, not least technology, are driving this dramatic shift, explains the report’s Author, Gareth Lodge. Thirty years ago, banks were at the leading edge. Networks such as SWIFT pushed the boundaries of what was possible. In the last decade, however, banks’ IT has remained static, whilst customers have accelerated away. “In effect, there has been a technological seesaw.”

“There is an argument that big banks have potentially the biggest changes to make; equally the biggest banks have the deepest pockets to make it happen. Secondly, those most able to change are likely to be those who have embraced the technology […] After all, willingness doesn’t equal ability when it comes to change.”
— – Lodge

Startup advisor and OB1 board member William Mougayar apears to agree with this statement, but points out that, “reengineering their business processes will be a bigger challenge than figuring out the technology.”

“It’s a long term vision. They would need to replace the DTCC and other similar clearing houses. That’s a multi-year, maybe decade-long project.”
— – William Mougayar, OB1 Board Member

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) is an American post-trade financial services company, providing clearing and settlement services to the financial markets. With roots that go back to the 70’s, and the “paper work” crisis brought on by a sharp increase in securities trading, the DTCC settles the vast majority of securities transactions in the United States, and close to $1.7 quadrillion in value during 2011.

"Those processes that came after the paperwork crisis were better, but there is a need now for a more elegant and better solution," said Hans Morris, a former president of Visa who runs a financial technology investment firm Nyca Partners. Nyca recently agreed to make an investment in a blockchain company called Clearmatics Technologies Ltd. in the U.K.

The Clearmatics investment is one of many this year. Visa recently participated in a US$30m funding round for Chain, which is among a handful of startups vying to dominate the new field of blockchain technology for Wall Street. Other investors included Citi Ventures, Capital One Financial and Nasdaq.

Nasdaq, the second-largest exchange in the world by market capitalization, has shown its interest in using the blockchain for proxy voting, and reducing financial trade settlement time, which is commonly a 3 day (T-3) process.

In an interview with the Financial Times, the company’s CEO Bob Greifeld stated, “I am a big believer in the ability of blockchain technology to effect fundamental change in the infrastructure of the financial services industry.”

“Clearing houses are a wonderful invention, but if you have a public ledger that is trusted, you can evolve back to a bilateral (trading) world but proceed with instantaneous settlement. We currently settle at T+3. Why not settle in 5-10 minutes?”
— – Bob Greifeld, Nasdaq CEO

Meanwhile, the Bitcoin Foundation’s founding director, Jon Matonis, is quick to point out that disruption will affect other entrenched legacy systems. “The current SWIFT system will be replaced but it won’t be replaced with private blockchains in another SWIFT-like cartel nor will it be replaced with a SWIFT-administered blockchain.”

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) provides a network that enables financial institutions send and receive information about financial transactions. The Society also has roots in the 70’s, and linked more than 9,000 financial institutions in 209 countries and territories in 2010, who were exchanging an average of over 15 million messages per day.

“It will be replaced with transactions riding on the value transfer protocol established via the Bitcoin Blockchain with its proof-of-work security and ultra-competitive hashrate. International, cross-border monetary transfers can then be cleared and settled without being @LaissezFaireBkssubject to arbitrary blockades, censorship, modifications, and reversals.”
— – Jon Matonis, Bitcoin Foundation Founding Director

Matonis, has a background in banking and worked for Visa and VeriSign before discovering cryptocurrencies. “The major constraint for banks is that they will still be operating in a fully-permissioned (and censored) environment which does nothing to improve the credential and authentication efficiency challenges existing today,” he states.

“It will be impossible for the banks operating in such an environment to leverage the unparalleled security and global access of Bitcoin’s Blockchain, which means that their proposed cost savings are largely theoretical. They are essentially trapped in a decision matrix of embrace bitcoin or resist bitcoin, but they will be unable to co-opt and prevent bitcoin.”
— – Matonis

Social Network CEO, economist, bitcoin speaker and publisher Jeffrey Tucker points out that leveraging blockchain technology may well be beyond the capabilities of many financial institutions. "[Banks] face a serious problem in trying to recreate an open source technology in a proprietary space,” he states.

“A major problem for many of the largest institutions is that they don’t have in-house specialization that understands Blockchain tech well enough to reproduce it."

• Jeffrey Tucker, CLO Liberty.me and Laissez-Faire Books Executive Editor

While Mougayar and Tucker highlight the difficulties faced by banks, Tally Capital’s Roszak offers a completely different opinion on why banks would state an interest in the technology at all. "There’s lots of pressure for these firms to cut costs, while operating in a technologically inefficient and highly regulated space, coupled with disruption on the horizon with the unbundling of financial services already in motion (Lending Tree, PayPal, Wealthfront, etc.) — however banks exploring blockchain today has its PR benefits, and in many ways is similar to the early adopter merchants accepting BTC about 2 years ago — makes them look tech savvy and smart.”

“I applaud the move — as this gives our ecosystem a shot of positive energy with household name brands associating themselves in this space (Citi, UBS, Goldman, Barclays, USAA, etc.)"
— – Roszak

The defining difference between “private” and “permissioned” blockchains, and a public blockchain like Bitcoin’s, is that they have access points. This means an entity, or group, controls who can access the services, which is a situation that regulators and banking compliance officers are compelled to favour.

PricewaterhouseCoopers is a multinational professional services network. It’s the largest professional services firm in the world, and is one of the Big Four auditors, along with Deloitte, EY and KPMG. The firm recommends that firms operating on a global basis need to demonstrate a robust compliance framework ensuring that each territory has sufficient oversight, and that Anti Money Laundering and Know Your Customer regulatory requirements are being adhered to at both a local and global level.

“Regulatory pressures concerning Anti-Money Laundering (‘AML’) continued to rise during last year and this looks set to continue throughout 2015. Increased pressure surrounding compliance with AML, Know Your Customer (‘KYC’) and sanctions requirements is a key focus for management and firms need to ensure they are following appropriate compliance procedures to meet the increasing regulatory demands.”
— – PricewaterhouseCoopers

Regardless of the reasons for adoption, many in the bitcoin community wonder what will happen if banks move on to using a public blockchain. Accenture expects investment banks to initially run private Blockchain solutions, until “capital markets players are confident in the types of services they can offer on a public (permissionless) Blockchain.”

KYC regulation may well restrict the types of services that institutions can offer on a public blockchain. The restricting access to customers is directly opposed to the basic premise of bitcoin public blockchain. ”A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution,” states the protocols white paper.

“Regulation is in the way of, or in front of any big changes that banks need to undertake.”
— – Mougayar

Matonis reiterates this point, regulation is a “major weakness” for banks. “The problem with banks is not that they lack a type of blockchain technology; the problem with banks is that operate in a highly-regulated cartel environment with massive government-managed barriers to entry and privileged status.”

“The main benefit to banks would be in the adoption of relying upon the ‘public’ Bitcoin blockchain as a way to gain market share versus their competition. Reduction of counterparty risk and reduction in float costs can both be achieved by transferring customer funds across the global Bitcoin network (with adequate liquidity providers). The banks that are early in adopting and leveraging this existing platform will benefit at the expense of the other banks.”
— – Matonis

In Celent’s report, Lodge touches on market share and the landscape of competition that retail banks face. “Previously banks competed with other banks who pretty much offered the same palette of products and services. Competition was relatively stable, incremental and predictable. Technology has allowed non-banks to enter the market, and they change the game.”

Matonis offered two examples of companies that embody this change, Epiphyte and Abra Global. Epiphyte works in the wholesale space, whereas Abra sticks to the retail space. Both use bitcoins to move value between legacy financial institutions, but they let companies like Coinbase or Bitpay deal with the volatility risk for them.

Using private blockchains means staying far away from this model, but demonstrates the difficulties that banks face. “I don’t see the banks using Bitcoin as a money service due to regulatory constraints, but the other places are good starting points of experimentation,” said Mougayar. Matonis concurred that banks are “not focused on the currency aspect, but rather on the applications side.”

A video released by Fortune shows the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, stating this point emphatically, “you are wasting your time with Bitcoin.” In his personal view, the US Government, and specifically the Department of Justice, would stop an emerging market based on bitcoin, should it be declared illegal. “There will be no real non-controlled currency in the world,” he states.

“Blockchain is like any other technology. If it is cheaper, effective, works, and secure, then we are going to use it.”
— – Jamie Dimon

For the time being, it seems like a given that banks will continue their search for ways to improve their current systems using private blockchains. For Mougayar, “it will be all a blur” in 10 years time, “with Bitcoin having permeated the currency space, and the Blockchain having permeated the applications space.”

Lodge states a similar outcome, “in one scenario, banks suffer death by a thousand cuts, and find that the most profitable pieces of their franchise are gradually eroded, leaving them with the burden of regulation and the cost of the commoditized pieces that are left. In another scenario, banks use this opportunity to re-imagine themselves, and focus on the pieces of the value chain that they are best suited for and generate the most value for them (and their customers).”

Meanwhile, Matonis thinks that central bank fiat money will exist side-by-side with bitcoin in the intermediate term. “This will tend to keep central bank issuers honest and over time bitcoin may be held in parallel alongside gold as a significant reserve asset.” While this doesn’t negate the need for a bank, there is an even bigger target that Matonis sees in Bitcoin’s crosshairs. “ultimately, however, it is central banks, not commercial banks, that have the most to fear from decentralized cryptocurrencies like bitcoin because it renders them obsolete.”