Chris Ballinger is the CEO and founder of MOBI – the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative. MOBI is a non-profit smart mobility consortium working with forward thinking companies, governments, and NGOs to make mobility services more efficient, affordable, greener, safer, and less congested by promoting standards and accelerating the adoption of blockchain, distributed ledger, and related technologies in the mobility industry.

 

About Chris Ballinger

Chris started out in monetary economics and worked briefly for the Council of Economic Advisors in the United States. Chris moved into Fintech in the early days of the derivates market. More recently he joined Toyota as the CFO of their financial service organisation, the same year that Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.

Whilst at Toyota he eventually went on to work at the Toyota Research Institute, which is Toyota’s arm in Silicon Valley that does the development of autonomous vehicles and robotics and AI.

Whilst he was there, Chris developed his thinking on new mobility services and how blockchain and distributed ledger's might be able to improve the new mobility service economy. Two years ago, Chris left the Toyota Research Institute ,and launched along with others MOBI.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is a particular kind of distributed database that is append only where the rules for appending blocks are designed to make sure that the information is agreed on by the participants.

But more generally, blockchain is common usage, it’s a broad collection of technologies, including cryptography, open databases, payments, perhaps identity, and probably quite a few other things.

 

Blockchain’s potential for redefining the automotive industry

For Chris blockchain and related technologies broadly bring four unique capabilities to the table:

* Digital twins: bringing digital identities to physical things.

* Micropayments: Today’s banking system is relatively expensive as is the variety of other trust services related to payments. By reducing the cost of those trust services and enabling peer to peer payment, the size of the payment you can do goes down. Once that goes down you can pay for more things with micropayments, thus enabling things that aren’t monetizable today to become monetizable. That may include the buying and selling of data from a car. Charging for city infrastructure in small increments for congestion pricing, pollution pricing, carbon footprint pricing and all these kinds of things might become possible with lower overhead costs for payments.

* Trusted shared data. When Chris was the CFO at Toyota, most of the financing was through securitization. Securitization, is the main financing mechanism for vehicles where a collection of auto loans get sold off to third parties. The overhead costs for that process, such as legal fees, accounting fees, reconciliation fees and trust are 1 to 2% of the value of the loan. Being able to have an open database that everybody can look at, share and agree as the single source of truth can potentially reduce the cost for transacting quite a bit.

* Data privacy and protection – the ability to control user data or third-party app data at its source, instead of it being shipped to a central database where it can be a single point of attack.

These are the four basic capabilities that blockchain can bring to the mobility industry. They can be combined in various different ways to create a lot of interesting use cases.

For Chris the single most interesting one is the ability for vehicles to pay as they go for things.

The combination of blockchain,