Blockchain Technology in Financial Services Market - Analysis and Forecast, 2017 to 2026

Market Overview

Financial institutions, ranging from banks and insurance companies to investment banks and audit firms are all exploring the potential of blockchain in eliminating the inefficiencies of the financial systems. Venture capitalists poured over a billion dollars in 2016 to further probe the viability of the futuristic technology. Financial industry, today, is heavily reliant on duplicative antiquated and paper-intensive processes which lead to large delays and impose considerable costs. Moreover, their centralized nature, makes them resistant to change and susceptible to systems failures and malicious attacks. Blockchain technology could not only eliminate these perils but could also pave way for an array of new product segments and revenue streams and provide billions of people access to financial services and instruments that have traditionally been denied to them. A blockchain is a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of records, called blocks. Blockchain records are time stamped and stored cryptographically in a chronological manner, which makes them immutable and tamperproof in nature. Blockchain presents the potential to revolutionize the pre-existing legacy systems by eliminating third party intermediaries, creating transparency, streamlining due processes and providing protection from malicious attacks, thereby enabling large internal and external cost savings. 

More than 40 use cases of blockchain in financial services are being explored including optimizing KYC process, trade finance solutions, asset servicing, claim management in insurance, and post trade solutions in capital markets. Leading financial institutions and banks including Citibank, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Barclays among others have all the efforts and investments to drive the futuristic technology. The growing demand for the technology has led to the emergence of a multitude of start-ups in this space, offering enterprise solutions spanning across processes.

Some companies have invested heavily and are proactively pushing the exploration of the technology through either isolated internal experiments or in partnerships with technology providers or in groups relying on industry consortiums. However, despite the build-up regarding the transformative potential of blockchain, more than 40% financials remain skeptical about the practical implementation and viability of the technology and have adopted a ‘wait and see’ approach for the near future. As and when it happens, the uptake of the technology could save the BFSI industry up to $XXX billion per year by 2025 in infrastructure costs, IT costs, operations costs, support function costs and personnel costs. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the technology will be the trade finance segment which could yield up to $XX billion in savings by eliminating middlemen and automating process ranging from tracking products through the supply chain to exchange of documents and final payments releases.  

Movement to blockchain based solutions will require large investments and efforts including annihilation of current infrastructure, which might make institutions hesitate from changing from legacy systems and processes. Moreover, the information placed on ledgers is being stove piped due to development of multiple blockchain, all with different standards within industries. This is leading to failure to harness network efficiencies and defeating the purpose of distributed ledgers. Certain consortiums and organizations such as R3, which consists of over 70 financial institutions, Financial Blockchain Shenzhen Consortium, and Blockchain Insurance consortium B3i are looking to circumvent this challenge by pushing industry stakeholders to work together.