Banking Expenditure Can Be Reduced to 80 Percent with Blockchain's Help, Study Finds

The early bird catches the early worm. This metaphor holds true for a lot of things in life. And apparently, it is also true for the banking industry.

A new study by Bain & Company, a major global management consultancy agency, found this to be the case. The study concludes that transaction banking is in a great position to leverage blockchain technology because of the advantages it possesses which no other innovation offers, Cointelegraph reported.

“Using this technology, execution, clearing and settlement could occur simultaneously, minimizing liquidity and credit risks. Custody and other post-trade security services also are under threat from new technologies,” the study states.

If done right, the distributed ledger technology (DLT) can cut the cost of trade finance transactions from 50 percent up to 80 percent. The decrease in expenditure would come from the significant spike in processing, with Bain estimating the speed to reach three or four times faster for billing, settlement, and payment.

Dr. Christian Graf, a bank expert and a partner of Bain, said in a press release following the publication of the study that financial firms are seeing a similar transformation to what the telecom industry saw over the last decade. He added that flat payments will take over “small-scale, purely transaction-driven fee structures” as it’s a better alternative to what banks are currently employing.

Moreover, Graf said that banks that will adopt and integrate blockchain the fastest will have a significant edge over their competitors. Of course, this isn’t to say that what Graf is claiming will absolutely happen.

The Central Bank of Netherlands released a study last week that declared blockchain technology insufficient as it couldn’t keep up with the firm’s huge number of transactions. This conclusion was the result of a three-year research by the organization, citing several problems that blockchain has, including the high energy demand that it requires to conduct its operations.

So in this particular context, it would seem that the early bird isn’t the one who’s at an advantage but the bird that cautiously observed the worm.