The Internet of Value

Introduction

The economic landscape is currently undergoing a fundamental transformation. The financial services industry in particular is facing unprecedented challenges, including augmented demands from customers and shareholders, heightened pressures to drive sustainable cost efficiencies, and ever-intensifying regulatory requirements to minimize systemic risk. These challenges aim to encourage fair competition and transparency. The winner-take-all, zero-sum status quo is being replaced by a new paradigm: a “co-opetition” environment in which companies must simultaneously compete and collaborate to remain relevant in an increasingly connected economy.

As a result, the financial services industry requires innovative, agile, and scalable methodologies. For example, the disruptive concept of distributed ledger technology (DLT) presents a unique opportunity to deliver these imperatives. This technology has the potential to disrupt the status quo in the same way that the internet did in the 1990s, by introducing the revolutionary concept of the “Internet of Value”¹ and transforming the competitive dynamics of the banking industry by connecting to customers in novel ways.

The application of DLT within enterprise-grade environments presents the chance to not only innovate and improve existing processes, but also to create entirely new ones. This report focuses on how the financial services industry can take advantage of DLT to do the following:

• Bring secure, ...