Blockchain Technology for Commercial Banks - Opportunities and Challenges

Opportunities

The decentralization, distributed accounts, smart contracts, and other features of blockchain technology will reconstruct the existing centralized financial infrastructure.
Firstly, based on the decentralization of blockchain technology, the transaction, clearing and settlement processes in the financial system will directly achieve point-to-point and reliable value exchange without central clearing system, which will directly affect financial systems such as payment systems, securities settlement systems, and transaction databases.
Secondly, blockchain technology will change the current mode of asset registration and certification. The registration or certification of collaterals and stocks, bonds, financial derivatives, and other assets will be digitally recorded in the blockchain, which cannot be tampered with and can be verified. Tracking and inquiries can effectively resolve issues such as transaction verification and follow-up disputes.
The third is to use the blockchain "smart contract" technology to implant currency issuance, circulation, etc. into specific trigger conditions to realize the transfer of value according to programming, so that only when specific conditions are met will it be automatically executed. For example, the central bank can issue digital currencies for specific purposes, so that these currencies can only be paid when they enter a specific industry, so that industrial policies can be accurately implemented.

Challenges

1. Challenge the bank's financial operating model

The current banking industry, regardless of its business model or risk control concept, has rapidly deployed investment banking, internet banking, and smart banking under the new normal of economics and finance, but its operating system and logic have not changed significantly or even fundamentally, the traditional business of the banking industry is still the "ballast stone", and the core is still stable.
In the future, with the widespread application of blockchain technology in the banking industry, its "decentralization" feature will fundamentally change the way credit is created, which will not only improve the efficiency and safety factor of the bank's existing business model, but also improve the efficiency and safety of the bank's existing business model.
Starting from the vision, it will also bring about changes in the operation mode of banks and major innovations in business models.
In the future, the function of financial intermediary will have a very great changes, and some roles in the existing financial system of banks will no longer be required, which will have great impact on some sectors, some departments will gradually disappear, and new business unit may be established in the future.

2. Challenging banks to innovate their ways of making profits

As the bottom layer of the architecture, blockchain has high reliability, simplified process, traceability of transactions and many other rules established by distributed accounting and storage, decentralized structure, time stamp, proof of work, etc. When improving data quality and other characteristics, when applied to the financial field, the greatest significance is to open a new ways for banks to innovate and make profits from the perspective of underlying reconstruction, and to reshape the financial industry ecology in many aspects, including traditional financial companies and Internet financial companies.
For example, the multi-servers feature of the blockchain dilutes the power cost of server maintenance, that is, the cost of mining, making low-cost micropayments possible. Banks can mine many users who have not obtained bank accounts in blockchain nodes. Develop new products for this part of potential users and explore new ways to make profits. Having received too many lessons from latecomers, if banks do not speed up their search for innovative profit models, develop new financial products and develop markets, they will not only fail to catch up with the wave, but will gradually become a “Channel”. Therefore, more and more of industry giants have joined in investing in, or partnering with, blockchain startups, including banks, as well as investment institutions such as Capital One , Citi Venture Capital International and Fiserv Financial Services.

3. Challenge the bank's data governance mechanism and capability

The expansion of new fields in the financial industry and the advancement of new technologies are inseparable from information and data, and blockchain technology is a subversive application of data. Therefore, commercial banks must not only do a good job in data management, to be prepare to a distributed management model. To combine with blockchain financial technology, to improve the ability of intensive enterprise-level big data analysis, transformation, and application, Through the establishment of unified and clear data standards, data connection is realized, efficiency is further improved, costs are reduced, and data security and effectiveness are ensured, to continuously improve the bank's forward-looking, intelligent, level of intensification.