Accenture report: 90% of large banks in North America and Europe are exploring blockchain payments (download the full text)

Accenture is a leading global professional services company that provides a variety of services and solutions including strategy, consulting, digital technology and operations. Recently, a report released by Accenture (full text download in Coin Library) shows that more than 90% of banks in North America and Europe are exploring the application of blockchain technology in the payment field.

The report is titled 《区块链技术：银行如何构建全球实时支付网络》（Blockchain Technology: How banks are building a real-time global payment network） Accenture interviewed 32 top international commercial banking professionals and asked them about their views on blockchain technology reforming the payment field. There are 20 top banks and 5 top institutions in the United States, Canada and Europe, and the executives involved in this survey are all from these companies.

The survey results show that 30% of banks are in the leading stage of research on blockchain technology in the payment field. The bank executives interviewed said that 17% of the banks are "at the forefront of reform" and 13% of the banks are "in the product deployment stage"; 70% of the banks are still in the early stages of technology research, of which 30% are "conducting proof-of-concept projects with other companies", 27% are "formulating corresponding strategies" and 13% are still "learning this technology."

Banks’ blockchain carnival

In addition, the report also investigated the most popular use cases of blockchain technology in the payment field. The most popular use case is cross-border transfer within the bank, with 44% of banks researching related technologies. Closely following are cross-border remittances, corporate payments and cross-border transfers between banks. P2P transfers are the fifth major source of income for banks.

Regarding supervision and compliance issues, 50% the bank executives interviewed admitted that the deployment and implementation of blockchain technology do have challenges in this regard. 66% of the respondents believe that supervision issues are the main reason for the difficulty in popularizing blockchain technology. 56% of the executives said that because the deployment of blockchain technology will cause rejection of internal systems, one-third of the compliance management rules regard security as the biggest problem of blockchain.

Blockchain is everywhere

Richard Lumb, global head of Accenture Financial Services, said:

Blockchain technology can solve the inefficiencies and frictions in global money transfers that have caused costs and remittance times to surge in the banking industry. Blockchain’s scalability has proven to be able to support cross-border transfer architectures. As the industry deploys the network structure, business processes and standards will run on this system. Soon, the payments industry will become the first test bed for blockchain’s enterprise use cases.

The cross-border payments industry is ripe for innovation. It’s time to adopt blockchain and distributed ledger technology.

Richard Meszaros, head of Accenture Digital Commerce and co-author of the report, said:

For most executives, the value proposition of blockchain is not yet clear, and top decision makers often do not understand the technology. In the short term, relevant technical training for employees and management is still necessary. However, the success of blockchain in the payment field depends entirely on industry cooperation and whether banks and non-bank institutions can work together to create a support network.

Most executives who participated in the survey agreed that no matter what blockchain solution a bank deploys, the network that is subsequently built cannot be “unique.”

That is, they hope that blockchain solutions in the payment field can also be participated by non-bank companies, including fintech companies and technology companies, such as Google and Apple. Ultimately, any company or participant will enter the same supply chain.

A senior Canadian banking executive said:

Ultimately, ubiquity will be the most important quality in payments. We will be able to transfer money to anyone, anywhere. It is meaningless to enable only bank-to-bank transfers.

This view demonstrates the importance of blockchain technology in reshaping the banking industry architecture.

Not yet in state

However, the overwhelming blockchain hype that began in 2015 has never stopped, and some banks have been kept in the dark and expressed confusion.

An American banking executive said that his bank is still in a "dizzy" state after receiving blockchain training and is still in the stage of learning the technology.

A senior executive of a Canadian bank said, "We don't even understand the specific situation and can't provide any advice." He said that they see all kinds of blockchain news every day, but still don't understand the situation.

Another Canadian banking executive said he had looked into use cases for blockchain technology but did not think the innovation was suitable for payments.

(Blockchain) is not a replacement for existing transaction systems. So we are working on proof-of-concept projects and other use cases to demonstrate the value of the technology.