Heartland CEO: Blockchain will power trillions of banking transactions

“I wish I could give you a grand vision ahead of time.”

That’s the first thing Heartland CEO Bob Carr says to me as we sit in the media room at the Money20/20 conference. The modern white leather sofas don’t match his holiday sweater. We’re talking about topics surrounding the bitcoin blockchain, the distributed ledger technology, and how it relates to the future of his New Zealand payments company.

Frankly, I was a little surprised by his presence. While everyone was chasing after the conference room, the CEO came to the media room to talk to me about Bitcoin and blockchain, especially when we were on break.

My hesitation about this meeting was not without reason; neither of us had any idea what to talk about.

In March, when Heartland inked a deal to allow its merchant clients to connect to BitPay, the industry was only a few months removed from Microsoft’s decision to embrace digital currencies, but even so, the company’s director of payments, Joe Wysocki, said the company was moving slowly toward the technology.

Despite the warnings, there was still optimism that other big-name businesses would quickly follow suit, but judging from the third quarter data, this recovery did not come true. But this did not seem to bother Carl, who gave the impression that he was still genuinely interested in the technology, even if he saw that his own business applications were not very ideal.

Carr told CoinDesk:

“I’ve noticed a lot of discussion about blockchain. I’ve been asking experts, ‘What should we do?’, ‘How much should we spend on it?’, and the answer I usually get is to wait and see how things develop.”

In fact, there is not a lot that can be done. At conferences like Money20/20, people in the financial industry gather in a crowded room, and the air is filled with the smell of technologies and products that come and go. At this point, he is still a little confused about what the next step for his company and blockchain technology should be.

“In my opinion, this is a curtain raiser for banks to use blockchain to solve problems between each other. High-end transactions between cross-border businesses will reach trillions of dollars,” he said, without adding any substantive details.

“This could be groundbreaking.”

Eliminating the middleman

Carr went on to pragmatically point out the evidence he had seen at the meeting.

For Carr, the idea that has more appeal than any blockchain product is Chase Pay, the new payment app launched by Bank of America. Interestingly, he sees the design of this product as a reflection of the potential benefits of distributed financial technology.

Chase Pay works by cutting out the major credit card processors from the transaction, and Carr noted that the application removes merchant transaction fees, similar to what blockchain does.

Given innovations like Chase Pay, Carr believes it will be hard for bitcoin to become a consumer-facing digital currency, the application that most of his customers are most interested in.

“I think blockchain is a much more important technology and bitcoin is an implementation of it, but it has a lot of problems,” he added, though he was not an expert on the subject.

He suggested that Heartland needs to understand the basics of blockchain technology, and right now, there may not be so many practical things to do. He believes that customer-centric companies need to understand Bitcoin and blockchain.

Paying Evangelists

As the conversation turned a bit negative, I still wasn’t quite sure which camp Carl was in, whether he was a pragmatist or a cautious optimist.

He often smirks when he talks about how others discount innovation, as if he were a gambler, or at least one of those people who believes in the "never say never" philosophy.

“I think bitcoin and blockchain have gotten a lot of media coverage,” he said. “There are evangelists, there are a lot of copycats, but there’s still a lack of adoption, but I think it’s slowly happening.”

As the conversation ended and he stood to leave, his optimistic skepticism seemed to awaken a little. He turned around and asked me what I thought. But I didn't have a strong answer.

“Well, one day you’re going to look back and say you were there from the beginning,” he said.

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Original article: http://www.coindesk.com/heartland-ceo-blockchain-could-power-trillions-in-bank-transactions/
By Pete Rizzo
Compiled by: Satuoxi
Editor: Satuoxi
Source (translation): Babbitt Information

Copyright Notice:      The author reserves the rights. The article is the author's independent opinion and does not represent the position of Babbitt.  
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Babbitt Information   41 minutes ago

"I wish I could give you a grand vision ahead of time." These are the first words Heartland CEO Bob Carr says to me as we sit in the media room during the Money20/20 conference. The modern white leather sofas don't match his holiday sweater. We're talking about topics surrounding the Bitcoin blockchain, the distributed ledger technology. http://t.cn/RUcfG72

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