Why Blockchain Matters to the Financial Industry

From The Wall Street Journal article:
CIO Explainer: What is Blockchain?

Week 2
Blockchain is both an exciting and scary word in the financial services industry. It is coming, or really, with bitcoin, it is here. And we need to determine how it will impact our industry. 

The best decription of Blockchain I have seen was in Forbes (How Blockchain Technology Can Change the World ), "Blockchain technology offers the intriguing possiblity of eliminating this 'middle man' "[the bank part of a transaction]. The Wall Street Journal's article, CIO Explainer: What is Blockchain? does a nice job of explaining in a little more detail what it means to the financial industry. 

In short, Blockchain will allow the creation of a distributed digital ledger with a distributed consensus process to approve any changes to the ledger.

As pointed out in the book Blockchain Revolution (Tapscott, Don & Tapscott, Alex, 2016, pp 58-59), Although banks and traders can execute trades with lightening speed, settlement of those trades, when cash actually changes hands, lags by several days. Blockchain could could make these payments as instantaneous as the trades they are supporting. 

The impact to the financial services will be transformational. The technological infrastructure to support these changes will be enormous.

Welcome to my EA 872 - Enterprise Architecture Foundations II Discussion Blog

I am Jill Sumiyasu, a student in Penn State World Campus' EA 872 class, Enterprise Architecture Foundations II. In this blog, I will present thoughts and reflections on class learnings and how this information is relevant to me. 

In his book Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution (2006), Ross Weill notes, "Top-performing companies …execute better because they have a better foundation for execution. They have embedded the technology in their processes so that they can efficiently and reliably execute the core operations of the company." We all want our companies to be successful. Enterprise Architecture can help us understand our strategy for success, and create a plan to get from where we are today to where we need to be in the future.