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Bitcoin & Blockchain: What do They Mean for Financial Services? | Publications | Fasken Martineau
Blockchain and digital currencies are expected to change the way parties transact in coming years. It has been suggested that the Government of Canada is likely to issue a Canadian Dollar digital currency in the future. The Royal Canadian Mint has already issued a version of this known as MintChip. The Bank of Canada announced, in a closed media session at the 2016 Payments Panorama conference, that they had been experimenting with “The Jasper Distributed Ledger Settlement Platform.” This project introduced the concept of a possible “CAD-COIN.” This has placed Canada in a unique position in comparison to other jurisdictions, as the government is actively exploring the applications of this technology.
Source: Bitcoin & Blockchain: What do They Mean for Financial Services? | Publications | Fasken Martineau
Read MoreBlockchain — What You Need to Know | Harvard Business Review
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Karim Lakhani, Harvard Business School professor and co-founder of the HBS Digital Initiative, discusses blockchain, an online record-keeping technology that many believe will revolutionize commerce. Lakhani breaks down how the technology behind bitcoin works and talks about the industries and companies that could see new growth opportunities or lose business. He also has recommendations for managers: start experimenting with blockchain as soon as possible. Lakhani is the co-author of the article “The Truth
Takeaways
- Blockchain = Trust
- Disintermediation = “Bringing the ends of a transaction together” = An exponential level of disruption not seen since the introduction of the World Wide Web in the mid 1990s (IMO)
- We are in the “dial-up days of Blockchain”
Source: Blockchain — What You Need to Know
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Read MoreThe Truth About Blockchain | Harvard Business Review
Ultimately, it took more than 30 years for TCP/IP to move through all the phases—single use, localized use, substitution, and transformation—and reshape the economy. Today more than half the world’s most valuable public companies have internet-driven, platform-based business models. The very foundations of our economy have changed. Physical scale and unique intellectual property no longer confer unbeatable advantages; increasingly, the economic leaders are enterprises that act as “keystones,” proactively or
Consider how law firms will have to change to make smart contracts viable. They’ll need to develop new expertise in software and blockchain programming. They’ll probably also have to rethink their hourly payment model and entertain the idea of charging transaction or hosting fees for contracts, to name just two possible approaches. Whatever tack they take, executives must be sure they understand and have tested the business model implications before making any switch.
Clearly, starting small is a good way to develop the know-how to think bigger. But the level of investment should depend on the context of the company and the industry. Financial services companies are already well down the road to blockchain adoption. Manufacturing is not.
No matter what the context, there’s a strong possibility that blockchain will affect your business. The very big question is when.
Source: The Truth About Blockchain
Read MoreProduct managers for the digital world | McKinsey & Company
Product managers are the glue that bind the many functions that touch a product—engineering, design, customer success, sales, marketing, operations, finance, legal, and more. They not only own the decisions about what gets built but also influence every aspect of how it gets built and launched.
Unlike product managers of the past, who were primarily focused on execution and were measured by the on-time delivery of engineering projects, the product manager of today is increasingly the mini-CEO of the product. They wear many hats, using a broad knowledge base to make trade-off decisions, and bring together cross-functional teams, ensuring alignment between diverse functions. What’s more, product management is emerging as the new training ground for future tech CEOs.
As more companies outside of the technology sector set out to build software capabilities for success in the digital era, it’s critical that they get the product-management role right.
Source: Product managers for the digital world | McKinsey & Company
Read MoreHow artificial intelligence can deliver real value to companies | McKinsey & Company
… early evidence suggests that there is a business case to be made, and that AI can deliver real value to companies willing to use it across operations and within their core functions. In our survey, early AI adopters that combine strong digital capability with proactive strategies have higher profit margins and expect the performance gap with other firms to widen in the next three years.
Significant gains are there for the taking. For many companies, this means accelerating the digital-transformation journey. AI is not going to allow companies to leapfrog getting the digital basics right. They will have to get the right digital assets and skills in place to be able to effectively deploy AI.
Source: How artificial intelligence can deliver real value to companies | McKinsey & Company
Read MoreBlockchain Could Help Artists Profit More from Their Creative Works
Enter blockchain-based platforms and programmable templates called smart contracts. Blockchain is a new technology platform, running on millions of devices and open to anyone, where not just information but anything of value — money, titles, and deeds, but also music, art, scientific discoveries, and other intellectual property — can be moved and stored securely and privately, where trust is established not by powerful intermediaries like movie studios, streaming services, banks, or other companies, but rat
In this new ecosystem, we see a place for Netflix and YouTube; a place for studio curation; and a place for fan-generated content. The film industry will still need people to sift through the hundreds of millions of hours of video created every day all over the planet. The key point is that the artists themselves will finally be feasting at the center of their own ecosystem, not starving at the edges of many others.
Source: Blockchain Could Help Artists Profit More from Their Creative Works
Read MoreBlockchain to Disrupt Balance of Power in TV, Music and Film Industry
The Blockchain is a perfect storm that makes sure the owners of content and the artists get what they are entitled to and don’t get squeezed out of the game. Smart contracts can enforce and automate the rights and distribution of wealth as payments to key parties. The Blockchain is the equalizing balance that puts the power back in the hands of the artists. Those with the talent can now decide how their content is used, who gets access to it and, more importantly, that nothing is tampered with, copied or hi
Source: Blockchain to Disrupt Balance of Power in TV, Music and Film Industry
Read MoreDeloitte Demos Blockchain Use Case for Art Industry – CoinDesk
The blockchain distributed ledger can trace the journey of artworks. When this technology is used in the art market, all events in the life cycle of an artwork are recorded and traceable. The application addresses one of the main concerns in the art market today, namely the fragile documentation related to the provenance and movements of a piece of art.
Source: Deloitte Demos Blockchain Use Case for Art Industry – CoinDesk
Read MoreHow Blockchain Tech is Inspiring the Art World
“It just kind of can be used for anything, to get rid of lawyers, to bypass copyright law – which is obviously really important for artists. It [the blockchain] will completely empower artists.”
Although it is still early days and crypto 2.0 is still in its relatively nascent stage, it seems that distributed consensus ledgers such as the blockchain will continue to gain momentum among artists, who are typically interested in ways of eradicating the middle-men to gain greater control over their work and their profits.
Source: How Blockchain Tech is Inspiring the Art World
Read MoreHow Older Entrepreneurs Can Turn Age to Their Advantage
The youthful, vibrant faces of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are representative of widely known entrepreneurial icons. But few people would conjure the more etched faces of Sam Walton (who founded Walmart at age 44) or Charles Flint (who founded IBM at 61) when asked to name a successful entrepreneur. Why entrepreneurship is so often correlated with youth rather than corporate experience isn’t clear, particularly considering that age is becoming a huge contributing factor to entrepreneurial success.
Source: How Older Entrepreneurs Can Turn Age to Their Advantage
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