Andrew Speers, Director of Product and Innovation at RBS, is passionate about user experience and developing customer centric propositions. In this podcast he discusses the important role blockchain can help as an enabler of other technologies to delivering great user experiences within the financial industry and beyond.

 

What is blockchain?

Andrew recognises that there is no standardised definition to blockchain and his definition comes from as a business user instead of a technologist, engineer or coder. Blockchain is just a distributed ledger technology (DLT). That DLT sits on top of the internet. It is a network of nodes. A node has a unique identity and it stores data.

 

Applications are built on that network like apps in the app store. Nodes can participate in one or many apps, depending on the blockchain. Andrew reminds us of a few more truth regarding DLTs:

* Not every DLT needs a blockchain

* Not every DLT has a crypto asset or crypto currency attached to it

* Not every DLT

 

Disruption within a fragment financial industry

Consumer Connectivity Insights 2018 reveals over 69 percent of global consumers would consider changing their bank, retailer or insurance provider due to a disconnected experience. For Andrew this has happened due capacity utilisation within financial services firms.

The financial industry is fragmented and is being disrupted. It isn’t facing disruption it is being disrupted. The issue at hand is that the banking industry is focused on products along lines of technical expertise rather than building products along the user journey or the user experience. If an individual or a business has a multi-product need it fragments as it moves within the bank. The client first goes through an originations function, then into the credit assessment function, then into operations and/or bespoke product knowledge such FX trading finance, insurance risk and others. Complicated clients with complicated needs have to go through a number of different silos within a financial services firm which creates a hugely disconnected experience for them.

DLT is coming to a maturity point now where it's helping financial firms to knit some of this together to create client centric user experiences by having a distributed architecture with identifiable data from corporates. These can be seamlessly stitched together and bespoke user propositions can be created. Clients can now have a little of FX attached to a little bit of credit assessment, attached to a little bit of trade finance with the exchange of data can be automatically transacted on the distributed ledger thanks to smart contracts, thus improving the user experience.

 

Challenger banks and DLT

Andrew recognises that these type of challenger banks are doing some great work. For specific parts of their business they are seen as challengers. RBS looks to embed the existing or incumbent technologies they’re using to catch up a little bit or to stop them taking transaction and their clients off the periphery as they build scale.

RBS is looking to DLT and how DLT allows banks to attach identity to client data and to their transactional data. It allows RBS to develop solutions with greater efficiencies as RBS does not need to constantly exchange information between the client and itself and their different departments internally, those fragmented silos that were mentioned earlier on. RBS doesn’t have to process, recheck and reprocess those same data points continuously.

It also means that for DLT clients sitting on a shared protocol such as