News

Deloitte Is Creating Blockchain Trust Layers Within Commerce

Melanie Kramer | Oct 20, 2018 | 22:00

---

Deloitte is working to create a deployment of blockchain technology for its global clients. The company’s first blockchain lab in Ireland is now over two years old.

The billion-dollar professional services company was quick to step into blockchain development services for its enterprise client base.

Many ICOs and blockchain innovators are creating ambitious projects which could take time to develop into real-world applications. Then, they will be faced with engaging consumers and businesses to adopt or utilize these new platforms. And that’s if they have the funding.

As a multi-national company with an extensive client base and now with its own teams of blockchain developers, Deloitte, like IBM and others could have a march on being able to bring blockchain into the real world, faster. These industry giants will still face issues.

The Deloitte EMEA Blockchain Lab in Ireland opened in 2016, it now has two more, one in Hong Kong, and one in New York. The Irish lab includes technologists who focus on design and development and also strategists who work with clients on their blockchain adoption and implementation.

The lab is an EMEA center of excellence for Deloitte, which works right from the idea stage, through to testing and creating technical architecture, design, development, and then to deployment.

David Dalton, consulting partner and financial services lead at Deloitte, told Silicon Republic:

We have all of the support you would expect in a lab. We have the R&D, we have the thought leadership, we also speak a lot and build awareness around it. But the core of what we do is work with building clients’ real-world solutions on blockchain technology.

Blockchain — Creating Trust

Antonio Senatore, chief technology officer, explained that organizations are looking to use blockchain to add an extra layer to transactional infrastructures in order to provide trust. This is something developers have been trying to achieve for years, finally finding refuge in blockchain:

You can see blockchain almost as an indexing layer, a trust layer on top of a data exchange facility, and that’s what we’ve been seeing so far.

This notion fits with real-world applications of blockchain outside of Deloitte. In payments and remittances, as well as supply chains, blockchain is first being widely tested for adding a secure way to confirm and share information pertaining to transactions and trades. 

Technology is Not the Only Problem

The challenge with this type of network technology, Deloitte finds, is getting industry stakeholders to work together — to decide governance and to turn ideas into reality. Anthony Day, CEO says:

The technology is really only 20 percent of the problem; the other 80 percent is getting a multidisciplinary group together.

Day says it’s about pioneering the future:

Taking blockchain live is more than just the technology. You are actually creating real transformation; you are creating entirely new ecosystems or processes that didn’t exist before.

These new processes need buy-in along the whole value chain. A challenge that blockchain will face in both consumer and commercial application across all industries if it will become a truly foundational technology.

What challenges do you think blockchain will face before mainstream adoption can be achieved?

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.