Page 13 - March 2018 Disruption Report

BLOCKCHAIN JAMNAURACRHY 22001188
Transitioning to the new digital world
At IBM Think 2018, The CUBE’s John Furrier interviewed Jesse Lund, vice president of IBM Blockchain. Lund said:
I joined IBM from 18 years at Wells Fargo. I spent really the majority of my career in nancial services and when blockchain came along, I ...immediately saw the impact, the potential for, ...positive disruption—disruption in the positive sense. Transformational paradigm shift kind of stuff in terms of how money moves around the world and how we classify assets and how we transfer ownership of assets.
...[B]lockchain has started as a mainstream focus for enterprises around building private networks, but that’s really just the beginning. ...[I]t gets really interesting when data and money are connected together and they move at high velocities together.
...If you think of tokens as another form of currency, and by the way, I think we have to be careful about what we say. ...[T]he industry talks about thousands of cryptocurrencies out there where there’s really not. There’s maybe dozens and they’re all derivatives of just a few models, bitcoin being one prominent model and there’s a lot of offshoots off of that. But the rest of what we call cryptocurrencies are really tokens that represent primarily securities, which is why the SEC’s getting involved.
But the really interesting thing about this is these tokens move at high velocity because they’re digital and so, but these digital things represent a claim on real world value, and that’s where it becomes really interesting.
IBM’s built and launched as ...its rst foray into the solution space of nancial services where IBM is an investor in this technology, a cross-border payment solution that inherently re-engineers this whole correspondent banking, this international wire process, and where FX, foreign exchange, becomes a real time capability in a series of operations that execute as an atomic unit. That’s novel today.
...So the novelty is why can’t the messages and the data and the value itself, the digital asset, ...move together at the same time? That’s what we’ve really built. But as we’ve built and deployed that and are getting banks and non-bank nancial institutions to sign up for it because the cost of moving money goes way, way, way down and the user experience goes way, way, way up because instead of taking two or three days and you don’t now how much it’s going to cost until it gets there, it takes 10 or 15 seconds and you know
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