If 2017 was the year of blockchain early adoption by mainstream businesses, 2018 to 2027 will be the decade blockchain solutions will be disrupting many industries across the world. According to Accenture research, by 2025, blockchain will be considered mainstream and integral to the capital market and ecosystem.
Blockchain offers the chance to truly rewrite the way companies and markets operate by delivering greater transparency and trust, removing redundant processes, and revamping inefficient capabilities. Beyond simply automating old processes, blockchain eliminates steps and activities amongst businesses and facilitates the restructuring of traditional value chains.
From financial industry to healthcare, retail, oil and gas, manufacturing, trade, agriculture, blockchain is redefining ways businesses operate and leading us to the ‘Internet of Value’.
Accenture is at the forefront of blockchain innovation and its practical, real world application. We recently demonstrated our innovation in Lagos, Nigeria in December last year. We provided business executives with a view of the blockchain-based technology landscape and its potential business applications. Our global team of experts works with each client to help build and execute smart strategies around effective use-cases and investment.
Blockchain has the potential to drive profound, positive change. We are working closely with leaders from across a broad range of industries, governments, consortia, the academic community and our key technology alliances to move the technology forward so that, ultimately, it can help to improve the way the world lives and works.
Inthe financial services industry, blockchain technology undermines the ‘middle-man’ business model. It makes it harder for fraud in transactions, and so reduces the value of credibility lent by trusted intermediaries. Therefore, players in this industry will have to re-imagine their business models given this disruption in their value chain.
According to tech experts, the healthcare industry has high hopes for blockchain technology since interoperability, or the ability to securely share medical records across providers and patients, is the driving force behind many technology investments within healthcare. It’s widely believed that blockchain will be the technology that will form the basis of securely creating and sharing medical records that will solve many of healthcare’s current issues of siloed stores of data that lead to the delays and administrative burden of sharing health information.
Every industry must startutilizing blockchain technology as a foundation to explore the convergence of a variety of technological tools to address customer centric needs and social problems that provide excellent business opportunities.
Those that take advantage of this will be rewarded with a resilient and anti-fragile digital infrastructure that enables the cultivation of efficient ecosystems, better products, and services, lower costs at scale, and improved outcomes for all.
Olaniyi Tayo, is the Managing Director, Accenture Technology, Nigeria