Blockchain is becoming more than a buzzword, and now there’s tangible proof

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Blockchain, which many experts have called the biggest innovation since the internet, has started gaining steam among bankers and financial institutions, a survey by Infosys’ Finacle shows.

Blockchain is a public ledger of all Bitcoin transactions that have ever been executed.

See: Don’t understand the blockchain hype?

India’s second biggest IT outsourcing company, Infosys, owns Finacle, which is a product that services banking clients. The company partnered with Let’s Talk Payments to survey 100 business and technology leaders from 75 institutions ranging from regional to multinational banks to come up with a reading of whether the phenomena of blockchains is hype or reality. Here’s what they found:

• 33 percent of respondents expect to see commercial blockchain adoption by 2018, while a majority (nearly 50 percent) see mainstream adoption by 2020.

• The average investment in blockchain projects in 2017 is expected to be about US$1 million.

• The majority of banks – about 69 percent – are experimenting with permissioned blockchains.

• About 50 percent of the banks are either working with a fintech startup or technology company to augment their blockchain capabilities, whereas another 30 percent are opting for the consortium model.
  51 percent of executives driving blockchain initiatives are either chief technology officers or “chief innovation officers”.

• Blockchain rollouts would be prioritized in business areas where it can significantly improve transparency, automate processes across enterprises, as well as reduce settlement and transaction times.

• The top five “use cases” that are expected to go to production are cross border payments, digital identity management, clearing and settlement, letter of credit process, and syndication of loans. These use cases, or practical implementations, scored more than 3.2 on a scale of one to five, where one was the least prioritized for commercial adoption and five was the most prioritized.