Joyce Chang, global research chair at JPMorgan Securities, has said that technology is still far from institutionalization and must still overcome key hurdles before it can break through to cross-industry at scale. Chang made her comments during an on the “Bloomberg Daybreak: Americas” television show on Feb. 7.
Chang noted that — if not yet institutionalized — is being spearheaded by industries with particular characteristics where the technology can bring real and immediate backend efficiency gains. She highlighted those sectors that rely upon cumbersome legacy paperwork systems, giving the example of trade finance, where she said she expects to have a particular impact over the next three to five years.
Another key area she isolated was information sharing, pointing to the ongoing expansion of JPMorgan’s -based , which already reportedly counts 157 participant banks:
“We’ve moved beyond experimentation, it’s still in use case form, but we are seeing more of the technology. Spain is ahead. The Australia Stock Exchange as well.”
Nonetheless, she identified key hurdles that would need to gradually be addressed before the technology could offer wholesale, cross-industry, transformational change:
“How do you get scale when the very nature of [the technology] is supposed to be decentralized? That’s the catch-22 about . I think they are still working through regulatory issues, also related to data privacy and security.”
Given the complexity of resolving these issues, Chang argued that the main focus of implementing the technology thus still remains circumscribed to specific use cases, and that certain industries pose significant difficulties for the technology at this stage — as for example, in supply chain and logistics, where the challenge of automating data input end-to-end remains considerable, she suggested.
As Chang argued, using to digitize trade documents and automate multiple trade finance processes has indeed gained significant traction in recent months. This January, the Singapore unit of -headquartered multinational banking and financial services firm Standard Chartered its first -powered trade finance deal.
StanChart is also one of a dozen major — among them and — to have jointly developed and launched a trade finance platform dubbed eTrade Connect last fall.
Chang has previously her position on the meaningful impact of for trade finance, adding that for global payments, it is unlikely “to reinvent [the] system, but [rather to] provide marginal improvements.”
Published at Sat, 09 Feb 2019 04:05:15 +0000
