Blockchain Solutions for Financial Services - European Blockchain Convention 2020

daniel gracias um okay here we are um good afternoon i'd say it's um always the toughest session when it's um straight after lunch and victoria and daniel did this to me already in january so uh i must have done something wrong to them in the previous life um joke joke jokes aside um i hope the audience has their coffees ready we have an hour and 50 minutes ahead of us and we have an interesting topic and um now and a half or now and 15 it's definitely not enough because we do have people on the panel with lots of experience both in blockchain and in financial services but particularly also in innovation which i think it's very very important so um i shall try start with that ladies first nadia would you give me just literally two seconds introduction and let me know where you where where you are live from as well which which city okay uh thank you mai i'm nadia filali i'm just talking now from paris today and i'm a head of blockchain and crypto asset program for question depot it's the most important french public and financial institution and at case depot we launched the blockchain program since in 2015 and we are a team around 10 people working on business development and technical parts and most our projects are with our partner from financial industry um and so we are working on internal project but uh most on a consortia project like club chain who is [Music] the main actor operating in blockchain in france and in finance like startups banks or insurance and also in a industrial project like liquid share and also in uh association project like uh inadvar that we launched last year and we are a member of the board very please indeed very good thanks thanks nadia and um david um i'll go on to you hi so i'm david crane i'm a innovation consultant and dlt specialist at gft um so um gft we specialize in financial services um we working with banks basically every large european bank is a client of ours in some ways in shape or form we specialize in innovation projects as well as standard banking all the way from mainframe right through to ai and quantum and obviously that a big focus of that is blockchain we um are about 5000 people um spread around the globe we're a multinational company and we've been uh in the blockchain field for what is it like uh six years now which might not seem a lot but it's it's quite a lot in blockchain terms because i kind of think about them a bit like dog years right so i think that's what like very good 35 something like that so yeah and you're joining us live from barcelona and i'm coming from barcelona yeah that's right fantastic very good um how about you sir tim hello hello everybody i'm talking to you from sunny frankfurt um yeah obviously not common in german germany to have such sunny weather sebastian kraft i'm a senior product owner of distributed ledger technologies of commerce bank commerce bank is the second largest privately owned bank in germany we're investigating in disputed ledger technology since 2016 already did a lot of pcs a lot of pilots and now have the first applications also running in production we're investigating all the fields which we think might be useful for banks like capital markets trade finance um identity management payments and also cryptocustody stuff and yeah now we are more or less in the face of um coming a little bit from the rod files into a production phase and yes i'm very happy to be here and i hope i can share some valuable insights today sure you i'm sure will excellent and um dean my passion to you please hi hi to hi to everybody um calling from paris here is sunny as well i think we can share the sun everywhere today i hope um so my name is in the mavic i work in being prepared by corporate and investment bank as a digital transformation leader precisely i sit actually in intersection of innovation emerging technologies and the business and i work on blockchain research and the fintech research market intelligence across dlt and blockchain ai space so this is in short excellent fantastic and at least or last but not least i should say scott please thanks mate um yeah calling from amsterdam uh today so i work for ing within the uh distributed ledger technology team here um specifically my role is as a initiative lead um looking at a lot of my expertise has been in privacy um for dlt um so specifically i work across one project which looks to use um kind of cryptography so like zero knowledge proofs to actually build out privacy-based solutions um but yeah of previously also other areas of kind of enabling more widespread use of dlt as well so things like interoperability and scalability and that side of it as that's brilliant thanks million scott okay guys um that's great um thanks for the uh for the interest and it's great to see that sunny everywhere um hopefully it's uh it bears very for our pound discussion um so blockchain and financial services i mean talk about a a wide title for for our panel discussion okay um very wide and yet with some common denominators just looking at um all of you here in in the screen um we're talking about certainly a business angle i think um we the financial services particularly the project you've all worked on has that business enterprise angle to them um the obviously interest in research emerging tech obviously the blockchain piece and third but at least is the innovation piece so the three of you working so the three of them working very very closely to all of you but i want to bring all of that to to the present and um you've all been in in blockchain for as as david mentioned dog years like you know five years at least at a minimum okay so if i and stay with me for a second here um i i started looking at a blockchain maybe sometime in 2017 if i had to summarize every year in blockchain i would say 2017 probably was bitcoin that's all people could talk about 2018 was icos uh 2019 was stos um 2020 might be dfi or central aldify or whatever it is but for blockchain in corporate blockchain for enterprise blockchain for the areas you guys are looking for is 2020 the year that we go from poc to reality to utility um who would like to go first otherwise i'll pinpoint one of you sebastian maybe yeah sure i was just unmuting myself yes i can i can say a little spread your mind a couple of words here um yes indeed so uh the financial industry was one of the industries which was uh starting to apply blockchain first because we saw a lot of danger for us we also saw a lot of opportunities for us and we now had a couple of years from as you were already saying pocs and piloting we now have to prove that um the stuff which we developed the recent years is uh really working and really bringing some benefit to the financial services industry and um if i if i look across on the areas which i was just i'm saying i think this was one of one of your questions i think there are a couple of topics which are coming near to production at the moment um i don't want to deep dive into trade finance but trade finance is obviously one of the cases where i would say this is a very good very good case for blockchain in in uh uh so in many directions um but also stuff like payments i think this morning we already had a couple of discussions around cbdc's programmable money and so on so forth that's something where we see a lot of demand from our customers or at least a rising demand especially from the corporate side then um all the things around capital markets securitization um of um sorry tokenization of securities here germany is uh uh at the franchise they are um really pushing this topic at the moment um so this is also very interesting and last but not least also identity management is something which is a kind of a ground layer for all the other um applications and i think um scott uh uh uh will will confirm that um having trustable identities in the blockchain environment is very very uh important topic so this is also something which is which is uh really popping up now so my feeling is that at the moment there's a lot of things going on and i'm quite sure that we are going to have a massive transformation in the one or the other um area in the next let me say two to three years later two two three years later is okay very good so so so let me pick on on on trade finance um sebastian and for that uh i'd actually go to you scott um you ing have obviously been probably one of the first ones really to to um to work together on a consortium with sorts okay and be part of marco polo so let me this was this started almost two years ago okay um but what can you i mean are you close enough to to develop the development of that i mean it's something that at the time it really was hailers at first um maybe the the uptick uh the volumes haven't been as as fast as we wanted is because we're still adapting to it yeah i think um so so you mentioned trade finance as a whole i think um yeah trade finance in in blockchain has has definitely been an area for us for ing that we've seen a lot of potential in um and we've been very active in um quite rightly you mentioned marco polo but also for instance um congo which we actually have which is in uh in production currently um and actually what congo is looking to do is is digitize and streamline a little bit the um the kind of commodity trade finance process and some of those uh those documents that are essential in in that process so things like letter of indemnity and uh letter of credit and and that sort of thing um and i think it has what we're seeing is um that it does have a lot of potential actually because um the processes that we're looking to to change with these are ones which have been um around the same way for a long time now so for 100 years for instance pretty much the same um but particularly we're seeing a large uptake at it at the moment actually because particularly when you think of fraud and items like that so the trust element that we can deliver there so some of the listeners may may be aware of the fraud um the fraud case which was seen in singapore fairly recently the uh trade trade fraud case and actually we're seeing a lot of a lot of interest in um things like congo off the back of that actually um as a key to actually more than anything i think an enabler of trust a mute hero enabler trust very good which is them quite interestingly something that um i mean this morning so far we talked about payments we talked about um about um ssi self-sovereign identity um but trust wasn't someone was not a topic that was picked up this morning which is quite interesting but we will come to that i think in in uh in in the context of financial services um later on i hope in our panel um thanks thanks god for for that intervention there um i'd like to to and continue with the theme of the the um the work in financial services um i mean you pretty much represent um strong financial institutions in europe uh david you you present someone obviously a very large company globally supports those financial institutions um yourself nadia as well in the and in the case of depaul you guys have a consortium as well i've been working together as well would you share your experience on that and i'm not sure you actually looked at trade finance as well okay uh no we are not working on on trade finance because it's not in our um we are not working on that we we are working on on investments and we are working uh especially when we begin we work about the opportunities of have some lean work in in putting blockchain in the post-market value chain it's why we begin to work uh together with bnp associated general credit in launching liquid share that the first aim was to develop infrastructure in blockchain for smes listed and unlisted on the post market and now we we open the focus of liquid share on on the seo possibilities also and the the fact is that when you work in blockchain working in blockchain for yourself it's not an issue it's important to create consortium with other groups or a smaller or bigger structure to contribute to the development of the ecosystem and to take the the the real capabilities and what is the the issue of blockchain in in the financial services and so we decide in the beginning to to work in an innovation consortium named la chain where we explored the things uh in the beginning many of the people was in the in the the monet departments but we saw that more people who are working in cab and post market who are very interested in the in the subject now sometimes we are going in the money subject or so we need to um how we said we we need to uh to develop some universal uh framework with different partners to have a certain level of cohesion between us and because we it's very important to to keep an interoperability between all the system that we we offer because even if you you you plug the the new infrastructure of blockchain it will be the same that we have now in our i.t system if there is no interoperability it will not work and it will be very um expensive to to manage and we have also to be careful to have the same view on the trust of the of the system also and on the to verify that we are uh we provide the security and the legal compliance and the the system that you you we use okay okay so now let's yeah so let me pick on on on that interpret interoperability it's a long word um so um because i'm trying to kind of bring in all the experience there um david um i i know we we very recently we just looked at the um the damn um um joint agreements okay um could we i mean i'm not sure obviously it's kind of hard to gauge the audience here it's not as as we had in january which we had a fantastic audience very engaging and stuff but maybe two minutes for those who might not be who understand financial services but may not be as quick to to demo why is the demo announcement the last 2-3 days so important in terms of interpretability so so first off for those who are not familiar with damo damon is almost a universal smart contract language that spreads across dlt platforms so you can use demo on uh corda you can use delmore on vmware blockchain you can use demo on a variety of other different enterprise and open source blockchains the idea is to spread it across these platforms so you only have to write your code once and then deploy its different platforms as you go um we have been um uh i would say a strategic partner of damo for the past three years a little bit longer than that um and we built up a big practice around that um in in gft um it it supports interoperability because it allows you to be able to deploy to these different platforms um and some of these platforms like we saw uh earlier last week they themselves also support interoperability so um the blockchain service network for example which we're just forging our partnership with now at the moment in uh which is going to be a global network which underneath supports lots of different platforms um the vmware blockchain itself which again supports lots of different black platforms and interpretations so this idea that you can write your code once and then uh deploy it to a lot of different platforms is is is promotes interoperability and then on the other side damil itself as a language is um is incredibly efficient so something you could do in say 300 words if you wanted to write in solidity you're actually doing maybe 100 words in demo and it's safer because you can't write code which is kind of empty you can't use anti-patterns you can't back yourself into a corner where you say okay party a agrees with party b without party b actually ever having agreed to that um so it's uh so it's quite a strong thing and um you know i just like to say congratulations to dean and everybody in the bnp uh paribus dropped your news earlier this uh last week uh cheers thank you thank you uh just to to add something on it uh if we have a startups actually on the call i think dumbledore language is ideal for them to actually uh also rapidly create mvp in matter of a couple of hours you can create mvp and test it they use via a double platform as a cloud so i think this is very powerful uh solution and this is why i'm saying for startups is actually ideal and for corporates as well and this is what i usually try to do in our organization actually to create kind of design thinking uh workshops where we can actually uh rapidly create the mvp in a couple of hours and the other things actually regarding the tamil i would like to say now that it's possible to do without uh coding you know the no code low code approach they already integrated i think uh e-intelligence and so the company that already integrated the demo and now they enable actually uh users to uh to actually drag and drop set to use those uh models so i think uh for testing uh mvps is a very good solution and you mentioned our involvement with tamil yes we actually signed a partnership with tamil in apec so what does it mean actually that we would like usually to bring together uh two apac market participants uh efficient both efficiency and the new uh revenue streams so the first uh application uh i think it's going to be about a smart uh election um uh process where actually the the the uh for corporate actions so it's very cool because the investors actually will have a straight access to corporate actions uh train data and uh to create kind of uh to enable them to have actually better understanding of real-time markets and this is the the real i would say benefits the other benefits are actually regarding the trade and settlements as well so i think our colleagues in apac i believe they are going to create i would say connection uh directly in real time for trade and settlement applications so just when i talking about this i would like to mention that australia stock exchange is one of the biggest use cases so far that we saw and the the because of this covered uh i would say situation so they postponed the go live for april 2020. so the other thing what i would like to mention uh regarding to this use case and i think we will agree now what you see we see in parallel this kind of decision transformation using native digital assets with actually conventional technology so going in parallel and cohc probably as you mentioned in a couple of years time we will probably switch but i believe that probably this kind of approach will be for the next ten years maybe maybe sorry go ahead okay just just just to add something on the interoperability uh thing which you are asking um i think one thing is indeed and that's i'm very happy to hear what we were just saying one thing is indeed how to ensure technological um interoperability between different uh networks for example is a very important topic but um let me also add that um also the non-technological stuff needs to be worked on like for example um standards um we are in in heavy discussions for example with the icc the international chamber of commerce with regards to standards for trade documents and so on so forth uh we are developing a safe sovereign identity solution at the moments where we try to um to to stick for example and scott might know these um all these standards from the did foundation and w3c so on so forth and also to shape all these standards um to bring everything into this new idea of distributed networks i think this is something that we say more or less um groundwork which we have to do as a bank beside developing our own new products on dlt doing the groundwork to enable all these things in the future yeah i agree so these two actually elements that you mentioned actually interoperability uh interconnection between chains and and standards and i can mention to you one real use case which is a spunta banco dlc i don't know if you know about that so we participated in this use case actually it's now it's a it's a real business with 32 agar banks so what is good about that as you mentioned standards so before that they they didn't have a standard actually how to exchange the data information so the whole use case is about uh interbanking interbanking the uh actually exchange so actually what does it mean for for for them actually to to to synchronize and reconcile uh the the the balances between the branches uh every day in real time which is amazing and exactly what you said actually they had a lack they lacked uh standardization and automation this is how i see so we are going to see probably the the first i would say wave of those difficulty applications in reality in those two when automation and standardization are lacking in terms of i mean standardization we know like for example the um the um is the isda i've done uh i think only recently published a paper actually certainly on on standardization and ideas from derivatives and blockchain and we know that tc307 are actually working on that as well and they have different working groups through that so uh clearly standards are totally different um and um in terms of purposes for trying to explain the importance of that you know compared to the application of the standards for wireless you know how quickly um wi-fi effectively went from just the lap to acceptance you know being in our homes it was literally pretty much two years from acceptance or agreement of the standards in the us to um to every home in the in the eu so i i do agree that stannis will have go back to to that point of interoperability that there's an angle there that i want to explore because i mean it's very rare to have people of your your background and experience together to have this chat and you know we've mentioned for the first 10 minutes we talk about consortia we talk about all these working together now we've we've really talked on on damo and and and the work um dean you work you specifically mentioned um helping or effectively the the initiative of being demo with the stock exchange in in australia with asx but also i think it's a hong kong exchange and apac this is the european blockchain convention all of us are working in europe yes where are the equivalent of what we just announced thank you what are we missing what are we not having thank you thank you for this great question you know what we are missing regulations regulations regulations and this is why because you know also the the what we are talking about here jurisdictional regulations you know because we all agree on this quality that the dlc blockchain technology is uh uh is global so you know what and now actually we don't have a global regulations our regulations are very silent and this is why actually uh i'm talking about apac because of the the data so the data so the the australian stock exchange actually has to ensure that that they keep data in apac you know so in australia and they can't actually uh create a real distributed ledger you know which are not sitting around the world so so no situ needs to be in apac and by the way so that they are creating this uh i would say they don't have a consensus but what they have actually they have one golden source and those notes actually connect real time in this golden source but the data is it is actually kept in in australia so this is uh exactly the one one issue that we are facing so regulations are but the regular regular regulations and they need to to i would say catch up with the speed of uh dlt blockchain i adoption i would say that i think that we're seeing some movement in that area so in the last what was it like couple of months we've had last week only we had um the i think it's a swiss parliament had a blockchain act um we had um finn buffin sorry not finma barfin in germany which uh you know uh basically legalized digital security is effectively being put into production uh so that you could then get certified to be able to to be able to sell and buy digital securities and cryptos um and also we we have various of our clients actively speaking with the fca um around similar projects in in the uk as well so that and they're in advanced talks around this as well so and obviously in switzerland they're very advanced in in in this because it's somewhat of a different different part so i think that regulation will come and it will come quicker than we think it will now the the ball has kind of got started um and i think that's one of the reasons that in in the pa we're we're in a very different space than we were maybe um a year ago so this this the same um conference a year ago we couldn't really put anything into production it wasn't even you just couldn't do it in any space and i would say that now out of um we have like eight eight projects going on at the moment and about out of about eight of those projects three of them are on a path for projection either at the end of this year or during sometime next year and that's a very different uh view from what we had last year where actually we wanted to put things into production but we couldn't because we the regulators wouldn't let us and then the other thing is about maturity technology so uh technologies such as dam or corda are a lot more mature than they were a few years ago um and also big companies um like vmware mentioned them before atm t are now getting into the into the game and that changes everything that changes the whole um landscape and large companies like yourself so you know banks or financial institutions um are willing to put more trust into these companies so it kind of makes a it changes things significantly i think absolutely yes and i agree with david i think the things will go quickly on regulation uh if you are looking what it's happening in europe in two two days you will have the proposal of digi figma uh on the subject of uh crypto assets in france already we have a regulation in lower pacts and we are allowed to distribute a token on on a ledger and securities on the ledger if they are unlisted we have a lo we are allowed also to be a custodian on crypto so there are some some opening room but the fact is that if you don't open the regulation on the european stage you cannot do all because i'm not listed it's very small market um it's one point the second point it's if you look at the point for example for the post trade there is a limitation on csd and there is competition on this subject there is many people working on the subject and to say they will do lean on the post market and cutting many intermediaries i think it would be more difficult that that we think it's a it's a point and i will join david also on the maturity of technology because for the moment uh we have to prove and to to demon demonstrate that we can go on life with uh on with many a transaction in in a few uh in a few times and for the moment it's not very clear always and we have to prove that we know how to manage security we have know how to manage the key to entering the blockchain and i will join the point of craft on the identity i think it's one of the key points and we don't know any announce in the in the press but uh last week we launched a company on ssi with question three other partner and here they found a post on this subject and we are working on on that not only on mvp but to go on live because we trust that it's one of the key of the entrance of those technology agree i agree with you and if i made yourself actually i think to the whole thing actually it's very important to understand the uh current uh regulations and how actually those uh dlts can actually fit in and the one example that i always mentioned and i will mention here you have is hqlax and the deutsche boots actually the the use case about collateral mobility and they did it and it's alive and they've done accordingly to existing regulations so there is no cash on the ledger yet but actually the title actually uh gets transferred seamlessly uh and the the existing uh our collateral stays with uh uh custodians so they use the existing uh existing regulations so i think we need to be creative as well and this is what i'm looking at if you live aware we can actually push boundaries probably with existing regulations and create i would say innovative uh uh source and that's exactly the point or the angle i was trying to look at dean yeah which is there there's there's two sides and they have to be quite separate clearly if we're dealing with financial instruments for which regulations already would already exist and then the blood the technology is actually applied to um increasing efficiency and lowering costs then it's just a case of of the plumbing you know effectively the the risk is the same the products the same the radiations really start there's a different there's no reason for those not to move from pro for concept to production effectively because it's still within the uh the regulation construct they know the risk is known it's that's why we have those regulations there um i i think maybe where the uncertainty lies within regulations is where we're moving to something that feels not quite or does not actually fit into a current regulation okay um but i mean germany certainly gone ahead with them with the recent regulations as david mentioned for for for sdos unfortunately for digital securities so um i don't want to go down to regulations just yet still a day and a half on on on the blockchain uh sorry in the ebc and um actually on this panel last year i had a fine anyone who said the word regulation had to pay me a euro after the panel so we we tried to have the discussion around innovation and not go down the regulation rabbit hole so i'm going to apply that fine again anyone who mentions regulations again for the next 20 minutes will will have to pay me you're after a digital euro that have exist okay so but but let's pick on another really interesting topic um that you you've actually just just mentioned there i mean we've talked already um about those sorry david you mentioned the the projects went into production uh dean you mentioned already the um already the uh um projects and in place with hulx um there's two things i want to i want to prove on those okay i mean you all work in labs and you have your own innovation labs um bitcoin started pretty much as a cyberpunk movement college whatever yeah almost ten years ago um damol is open source um how many of those projects are going to production actually are not that open source or the veiled question there is is the is the traditional financial institution the financial services sector still not quite trusting the openness of the technology choosing to maybe rely or trust more a permission type of um platform who wants to take these a little bit perhaps may if if i can i think you are you are on a point very important on this subject because when you are talking about blockchain you are talking about trust and confidence and uh more precisely we are addressing the the blockchain governance here and what's about uh private or consortium blockchain versus public and what's about the consensus that we have to and the incentive that we want to to work on and if you try to work on public blockchain in a in a financial institution you will have in the beginning i think some reaction of the the board it's not very easy on that because people don't know about the covenants of this public blockchain and there is a many buzz on on the subject and there is some interrogation of uh on the iml on these things and unlike this it's the first point and because you talk about the i will not say the word about the the the topic that we are talking before um i think for the moment and perhaps it's moving for the people who are working with uh thinking innovation in finance and thinking another finance system it's very difficult for the moment because we know how to manage finance system with um some key actors in the system with the the people who are looking what you are doing on but imagine that the system it's open and decentralized it's very difficult it's it's very difficult for every human being i think but it's very difficult and sometimes when we are talking about blockchain and finance services we are in in the first way just changing the technology for use cases that we know so i think on this point we can do things but it will take it's depend of the time and the cost then but it will arrive one one day and the second time it's how to imagine new services or using this technology the central in this decentralized way and with open source for example on on some smart contract or things like these it perhaps with a a subject of some standardization again and this point is very difficult for the moment i think i think i'm sorry sorry yeah sorry david go ahead no i i just think i mean when we're thinking about open source and and um and private and and public um uh uh uh chains i mean i think they're kind of almost different subjects in my head um anyway because open source in reality that one of the reasons the demo open source is because they were under increasing pressure from banks and other organizations to let the open source community come in and actually go through their code and really properly go through it so they they improve transparency but that doesn't mean that that damol is going to ever be necessarily on a public network i mean actually dammle has has stopped using its own platform and you can use it on various different networks but the one thing is open source which basically means that the code has been opened and can be changed and adapted or whatever depending on the license and then the other thing is is is whether it's a public or it's private um uh platform or not and i think in in the next few years you're going to see um a lot of um different types of um public cloud platforms like cardano for example that support side chains and so on and so forth and you're also going to see so that you have a certain amount of privacy on a public blockchain which allows you to be able to work within um commercial um kind of things we do in like financial services and not have everything out there in the public and on the other side you're going to have certain platforms um like like the bsn which provide private and also public um uh blockchain platforms that are interoperable depending on what you want to deploy at that point in time so i think in the future you're going to have much more optionality it's not going to be a or b it's going to be really you might even have one platform that you use for a and b and you just swap between whichever you want yeah yeah um the the other thing actually that i would like to mention here as you mentioned very well actually i think uh let's say corda so when we mention corda dlc so we we picture that as a private blockchain but corda is public blockchain as well so they have a public side public blockchain and private blockchain and then so there are some use cases i don't want to go deep by now but they they actually just connect to those public employer blockchains and the best i would say example is dazzle distributed assets uh securities security ledger so they created this kind of i would say solution so that they have a couple of use cases uh already in introduction and there are some well they are published sorry no but i say this is very very good what you mentioned and there are some people who firmly believe that unless you put your um tokenized object or your um transaction on a public chain then it's not really i don't want to get into this rabbit hole because this is more about an opinion or other than anything right and we as as a as as a technology services provider we don't we generally just just tend to implement rather than have opinions but there are some people that firmly believe that actually for an asset to be recorded and for it to have a kind of stamped proof of approval it needs to go on the public chain and this is you know throughout um even through enterprise blockchains so um so they're putting certain things on the public blockchain they're a lot of the time they're using cryptography to be able to hide what it is that they're putting on the blockchain so heavy cryptography on top of that um but that gives them a kind of security that it's available publicly and if anybody wants to check the records and they can so there are some people that really do believe but so when you mention the public so this is it so that opens up actually discussion about consensus uh what kind of is this uh proof of work or for faith and i think for financial uh services this is not the question actually so we need a finality so uh you know the feministic contracts as uh as you know so finality probably comes connected with uh with rcgs system as well so i would say for financial services is very important okay yeah i mean i i would just agree that generally we're working on private um networks in general with our clients at this point in time okay so i'm trying to to explore um you know back back to my my challenge question of why do we see at the european level the type of initiatives like we've seen for example with emerald and asx and i know we we mentioned the r word but i was i was trying to dig a little bit in terms of um you know we have all these amazing financial institutions you know financial services call your bank on insurance companies 300 years old 200 years old 150 years old okay um we do have legacy issues we have data issues you know so let's forget the regulations um uh across border differences in european union for for for for particular for now um is there something really um that's another blatant um obstacle to to doing more of that to really making a a pano-european blockchain solution for example for for trade for letter credits for assets is it data is it what is it i think is it my reasoning sorry go ahead go ahead sorry i i think the the first the the real point if if you find uh an economic advantage to go on and quickly to go on everyone will go on it's the first point can you define define what economic advantage is um we have to try to find business model were are real and where there is object there is two to two kind of thing if you want to do lean and to be more efficient you have to find a business model that lets you be more efficient very quickly and to not forget how much you you paid your net worth before it's one of the points i think because we were we are all working on the big institution and we know that there is a cost to to have a network infrastructure between banks and there is cost to have a [Music] ita system in each of our bands so uh we have to find the the difference a positive uh advantage to change that quickly it's the first point the the second point in how you can find a business model for new services on blockchain and for the moment it's not always a real case and for example when we talk about identity and ssi and it's what we are trying to do with archipel in french articles perhaps in english we try to found a business model on the on credential kawaii system in a new way to appear and we hope that it will works but if you only change online infrastructure on course market and you see that all you do before it's very expensive perhaps you will not go now [Music] so this is a real point it's it's the business we can do how we want on innovation i think we are all around this table uh working on that point but uh your your company will ask you what is the the written investment on the subject so it's the point i think really sorry craft perhaps you feel agree lots of nodding heads tell me what you what do you think celestian yeah i know yeah first of all uh everything what you are saying is is right and that's uh also one point where we try to bring the stuff into production now because everybody is looking at us saying okay now you had uh four years of burning money and now show me what you got out of it um but let me also uh bring another perspective um on what may was asking like what are the obstacles which we see um and building something european-wide um just beside the things which which we already uh were talking about so so um the outward which we are not going to mention anymore things like um anti-antitrust which is always a very big topic for banks um interoperability we also had um this topic already there's another thing or there are a couple of other things which i which i want to mention um for example may you already mentioned um three to four hundred year old companies banks are used to uh work in strong and very strong competition and now um dlt means uh working together in kind of uh a cooperation somehow and this is something where we are not used to um so there's something which we which we needed to learn also um all the things around um how to deal with uh ip of software which a bank develops with another bank this is something um honestly i don't know um how the other guys in the round um what their perspective on this is but this is something which we had to learn yeah the first developments which we met uh which we made um then we were talking about the contracts um talking about ip rights then we went to our lawyers and they were saying like okay ip rights we've never dealt with this before yeah so this is something where we have to get used to it and we invested a lot here last but not least also topics like um governance in networks also something which we are not really used to okay there are things like swift so on so forth also existing like i don't know 100 years with the proven governance structure this is also something which is very new to us and this is something which is um hindering the innovation in blockchain space for me on the european level at the moment but it's getting better yes i i agree we crafty it's one point that's uh many times you see a blockchain project and you think that it's distributed and it's not distributed there is one node or three nodes it's the same company and for example on our people we have five nodes in five company and so if or mine to manage this it's not very easy and it's new for everyone in the in the company it's in it's new for the 80 teams it's new for the legal team it's new for the the security the cyber security team because you offer them that they have five door and not one door to protect so it's sometimes uh difficult and we have to invent this now together uh and it's a true point i think it's a real point yeah i i also completely agree with um sebastian's statement as well i think um all of all of these items you know you mentioned ip as one for for example like all of these items actually add to the time and the complexity that it takes to take things to production as well so people um people potentially look at the blockchain or dlt industry and uh and you know may have the view that actually um things things are going things are going slowly or you know you look at that um if for anyone who's seen the kind of gartner hype cycle um you have a with with blockchain at the moment they kind of highlighted it as being the term is like the trough of disillusionment so you have the years of hype and the years of people talking about it but actually it does take time to take things to production all the all the kind of internal compliance nor issues like that as financial institutions that we have to think about um but i think i think what is happening now um for us at ing and for others on the call as well is is now we really are starting to prove the value of that you know we we all have applications that are in production we are all trying to move our backlogs um of various initiatives into production so i think very soon we will start to see um yeah tangible value from that as well yeah i think i think one of our major one of our major projects that we ran with uh sia so see the payments provider in italy um it was a three year long product we did the we did the poc with them um we did an mvp and then we did and then we did the the actual production rollout um with i think it was like three or four banks um in the end uh in in italy um and um and half of the time that we were actually the the one of the most difficult thing was actually aligning everybody and so they spent a lot of time on business development a lot of time on on getting everybody to agree on how the network was going to be set up and all these things regarding governance this took a lot more time than the actual implementation itself the implementation itself was relatively quick and easy um so so i mean i just yeah i just second that definitely takes takes a lot of time to get all the all of your ducks in a row in that kind of project which is thank you for this because like in my experience you know you get to talk about blockchain and financial services and the sims you know we tend to kind of fall into the discussion about regulations as an obstacle but when you really start asking people like you who working in those labs who know really what it's like to have come up with this thing that then you have to go out there like it gets to a point that you have to open the door of your lap and go into the big world worlds right and really talk to people and it really is not about that really is about all sometimes is this cultural change it's the uh really the the reason is about the uh the governance around the networks the ip and all of those pieces that we've quite tricky but um certainly i think from a financial services perspective um are the the invisible um enemies really for for i think blockchain to to really truly be um brought in to the financial services for for transformation that it requires so i think that that that would definitely would be good uh for both for as a citizen was a was a retail person but also for the economy um and on that um do you guys and this is a question i mean for maybe to understand as well is there is there an element maybe a of a of a the two types of speed when it comes to development in blockchain and financial services or is it two parallel um streams so we we've mentioned a lot of um projects going into production mostly obviously in the enterprise yeah in the business to business the call of duty i believe the later the letters of credit or the trade finance uh to a certain degree as well we talked about the digital assets and the corporate actions so they feel like the uh they are projects so their products for the for the companies do you in your businesses guys is it too early on to to start are you looking at products where it just takes the retail side of things like the citizen side of things is that even further down the line is it something that's maybe it's left in that parallel finance world to um to startups to fintechs to blockchain companies what are your thoughts on that i think one of the points it's that it's more easy to launch a project even if it's completely implicated to work together with a big institution but if you want to go ahead and to have to work on on b2c uh project or working on a project with uh with new clients or new services is more difficult for because for the moment we are looking for the things and sometimes the things don't happen and we talk about stos we talk about icos and if you look the market it's it's very small for for the moment really small it's one point and after that it's [Music] uh it's the same if you are looking the investment in in startups and then fintechs in in the in this ecosystem because it's difficult for vcs for the moment to go on on these subjects and clearly on the on the the first the first investment in early stage on this subject because you have to understand the technology and the projects that are there completely and because there is a lake of of trust and confidence on this subject too so it's uh it's like uh like a cat uh turning around his is it's not going really quickly so and the the paradox perhaps it's that i think that there is more innovation in the second part that in the first part so we have to to wait a little bit more i stopped joining that one everyone on youtube yes dean what do you think i mean you're you've been working over 15 years i mean your background is engineering you've done the the move to financial services and innovation um do we need to prove a financial services product that makes money before we can actually you know what so this is i work with startups as well um it's a blockchain startups and the the very often actually i see that that they don't have actually much market product fees so the end after that actually so they have an idea but they don't have a they didn't attach actually uh business value and obviously so i think we need to uh in any industry we need to attach uh business value to our initial idea so this is what i see uh believe me or not actually you say okay but if you know when they work on this so they will have a business where they know that people i think people think okay so this is the the challenging for for me i will go and develop that so i think we're still actually seeing this in reality no uh such as as as a big idea you know what i mean like a big pain point so so we would like actually the blockchain to the dlt to to solve this big big pain point for my clients and what i'm saying actually if i may use this opportunity i say there are some big big big pain points let's say in what we saw recently again with with singapore stock exchange they produce a digital bond and in europe we have a very nice uh startup agora so this is what i want to mention working on corda two actually uh two uh actually uh created this uh digital bond yeah so we have we have a pre uh pre-bond and post bond actually challenges uh you know so usually people call each other or or actually they change the the excel spreadsheets when they uh syndicated the bonds you know so i think so the agora issue is just looking to resolve this problem so this is i would like to mention that as a great opportunity the great great approach and i think uh they already attract a lot of attention from the industry well i mean one one thing that i suppose just to mention around the around the sgx and hsbc um the use case well the the project is that i think a lot a lot of the stuff that's been done before has been around sending a single bond across a financial services network and the difference between what sgx and hsbc have done is that they have a system now that they can use to be able to manage the issuance and redemption of bonds and that's and that's going to eventually be rolled out into a production application that's quite different to what's been done before and i suppose that's maybe the power of doing the things inside a company rather than doing them from a startup because you think you can think about the long term you can think okay well look i have this idea this is you know just to see that i have in my head like i can actually plan this out for the next five years whereas actually if you're a startup you have to have the idea be able to promote it but you don't necessarily know whether that idea is going to be able to be seen through to it to it to its you know final solutions i just mentioned this setup and just would like to say that they're like uh software as a service so you know what so you can create a bond and after that use the apis actually and after that you put on its own exchange and you know so so i think it's a very very clever but this is what i see see that this blockchain uh solutions need to to resolve those big issues at the moment challenges that we have the other thing is uh about collateral you know so this is extremely important for the whole industry because as you know and i see some startups are tackling this as well so so okay so let me um just trying to to summarize the conscious obviously of time and we've had a couple of um of uh of questions coming through from the audience um and some of them i i don't think we should be to not know that we should like but for example i know for a fact that tomorrow there's there's a there's a whole panel on on um digital assets and stos i think later straight after us i think there's there's also a uh a panel on cbdc's and stable coins so there are panels just to top to discuss some of those topics and financial services is more just than just the payments thing right um it certainly is about providing the these this benefit to society of funding and the the matching creative liquidity funneling capital when it's needed providing for savings insurance and so forth so a very wide topic and some of them relating to blockchain will be covered i think later on today and and um tomorrow as well so i think we've we've definitely covered that um um it we've covered or at least we tried to wriggle down to the important thing or key theme for 2020 certainly being the coming out of uh out of the lab into into production moving into finally to this utility uh we've covered the the importance of um more collaboration and breaking down the warriors as difficult um as it's been sebastian has mentioned um on that like the very first blockchain conference i have attended in 2017 was a european finance blockchain um and at that conference um jeremy wilson who at the time was the chairman of the commercial bank for for barclays said that financial institutions big banks in europe would have to learn to cooperate to be able to compete in the future i mean that was three years ago and we're still here yes so i just think it's just um you know as financial services and blockchain i think there's a real true um opportunity and this is not just about the stable point of the or the payment thing this is about the wider picture that as to david's mentioned it's the there is an element of having that experience in financial institution that allows for the long-term planning and it feels like there's an opportunity here that we should be grabbing um in this space that we haven't really find a way to do that just just yet so i'm conscious we have about five minutes to go and before daniel's face pops up um i just wanted to to to ask each one of you you know like you've been working in blockchain for five six years which is a long long long time um personal question will you still be working in blockchain in a year's time are you passed and i know just just give me give me your uh you've got a feeling i is a case like you know are you do you need to have that resilience that it takes to see is that this this um this amazing technology uh mature and see-through and uh and second um if you if you had to point out or pinpoint or put your the name on a t-shirt of one financial product that's really going to benefit from from blockchain which one would it be and i'll start with scott tell me uh so will i be working blockchain in five years time uh yes i believe so i hope so no um yeah no i think i think as as as was kind of touched upon earlier we're it's it's really now that we're starting to see um the value of it being delivered upon um the promise that's kind of been talked about for a while and i think now we're starting to see that um unfold um so i think actually it's only really the beginning of um you know defy and and and of um dlt uh in general um and i think really to your second question um where do i see most value i think um to be honest it's uh it's kind of we have two tracks there's there's where we use blockchain and dlt for kind of efficiencies but the other side is actually where it's an enabler to open up kind of new business models and um uh yeah new new um opportunities that kind of wouldn't be there before so um tokenization tokenization of assets kind of yeah just unlocking um new business models that might not have been there previously so um on a more generic level i guess that's that's where i see uh most opportunity moving forward very good thank you who wants to go next tokenization of assets on the t-shirts i get it yes i would i would i would borrow your stations as well i will put yeah i think the digital security assets are number one but having said that actually i would like to see payments as well i would like to see cbdc and uh stablecoins how the cbc cbdc actually can help us with payments just to say that today we have 17 trillion transactions on the world's wide payments so we need a smart money so i would put here smart money programmable money i love it i love that t-shirt tell mr austin what would you be on yours how much how much how much space do i have on my t-shirt okay so first of all with regards to your first question um yes of course i'm going to stay in the blockchain field because it's now starting to get real traction so i'm really happy to see that um and i can agree with dean with uh uh his um his uh what he was just saying with regards to programmable money not only cbdc but also putting commercial bank money on the letter will be something which is um i think one of one of the main topics in 2021 and what i would love to see but um i'm not very convinced yet that it's going to happen next year so i would not put it on the t-shirt it's the convergence of other technologies with blockchain so um sensoric cloud stuff advanced analytics and so forth but i think this is going to uh take another couple of years sebastian you can have smart money in the front and iot and cloud at the back perfect we allow that on your t-shirt i like it very good um uh david nadya who wants to go next uh i'll go next so yeah i definitely see myself in the blockchain space in the next five years now about a question of doubt um and yeah i mean in terms of t-shirts i think um i think for us regulated crypto regulated crypto is a big thing this year um this is something that a lot of our clients are looking out to be honest with you um and um the other thing is you know a blockchain for um investment banking blockchain for investment is going to be huge this year i don't know maybe on the back right on the side i just want anyone hot to the front investment banking at uh yeah and a lamborghini um at the front door maybe very good very good david uh nadia last but not least tell me yes um i'm like scott i i want the things more be me be more open and more innovative and i'm also like small like sebastian so i will set tokenization of multiple assets a real and financial one and i will set the collaboration too because it's the point that's a very good point nadia excellent well collaboration i think would probably would have to be the one on all other t-shirts okay um excellent daniel um conscious words were fourteen zero zero hundreds whatever my clock i think we're on the clock um i'd like to say thank you to to certainly to my excellent panel as usually when i have a panel of this caliber i think an hour two hours is not enough i do miss the the virtual sorry i do miss the real coffees or the chances to to meet at coffee break so maybe we'll be able to do that in in real time some some time and um daniel um live in the panel we've come from amsterdam from barcelona paris frankfurt and dublin um thanks for the chance um i think you and victoria should sum up all the carbon footprint that we have saved from this virtual i think that's a very important point yeah honestly um it's i do miss the uh the social interaction but i think the um the reduced carbon footprint it's it's a good thing to um to put out there as well okay thanks everyone and um hopefully the audience enjoyed um sharing these are and 15 with this incredible people have a good day thank you thank you so much i was thinking thank you thank you if you if you think you left something we could stay for another hour i don't know just just a joke thank you so much to all of you tomorrow morning tomorrow thank you so much for being here thanks everyone thank you thank you thanks okay bye guys all right yeah okay they should be done so we will go live