Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Blockchain could save investment banks up to $12B a year: Accenture

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 83 posts

Re: Blockchain could save investment banks up to $12B a year: Accenture

#21

Post by bduerst »

arjunnarayan wrote: post #13
patio11 wrote: post #12

Blockchain here refers not to the distributed database technology loosely coupled with Bitcoin but rather "assert the existence of a database; simultaneous adoption of it across all parties that matter in the financial industry sure would be swell now wouldn't it." Which is true. Databases are pretty useful things. It's a shame banks never thought of adopting one before.

"Another aspect of blockchain, as I often emphasize, is sociological: Blockchains are cool. If you announce that you are updating the database software used by a consortium of banks to track derivatives trades, the New York Times will not write an article about it. If you say that you are blockchaining the blockchain software used by a blockchain of blockchains to blockchain blockchain blockchains, the New York Times…

This is tangental, but his analysis of Uber seems to be spot on:

>Eventually there will be self-driving cars, and there's no special reason to think that Uber will be the best at building them, or that its dominant position in the ride-hailing-app space will protect it from better self-driving-car businesses.

Re: Blockchain could save investment banks up to $12B a year: Accenture

#22

Post by sly010 »

spangry wrote: post #19

Oh god, not this again. Sounds like Accenture are looking to bring in more 'technical integration' clients (read: marks). Government and old financial being the favourites, given their deep pockets and technical illiteracy. If anyone is in a job that involves holding back some of this insanity, this decision-flow diagram might help: http://i.imgur.com/4nZ67Sq.png

There is a mistake on the diagram. The rightmost ellipse should say "you don't need a blockchain". The rest is accurate.

Re: Blockchain could save investment banks up to $12B a year: Accenture

#23

Post by di4na »

ecesena wrote: post #9
wildchild wrote: post #6

Postgresql too.

I understand this was prob a sort of joke, but I'd be interested in a data point on how much a free db could help save. Is $12B reasonable, would it be much lower/higher?

free maybe. The real point being that it is one that works. A big part of the financial but also the entreprisey world in general have never left the 80s/90s. The idea of scale does not exist.

Re: Blockchain could save investment banks up to $12B a year: Accenture

#24

Post by josu »

For context, Accenture has been criticizing blockchains for their immutability. [1] [2] [3] So I would not take anything coming from them seriously.

[1] Downside of Bitcoin: A Ledger That Can’t Be Corrected: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/business/dealbook/downside...

[2] EDITING THE UNEDITABLE BLOCKCHAIN (PDF) https://www.accenture.com/t20160927T033514__w__/us-en/_acnme...

[3] Accenture Launches A Way To Edit Blockchains: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomgroenfeldt/2016/10/06/accentu...

Re: Blockchain could save investment banks up to $12B a year: Accenture

#26

Post by bdamm »

bduerst wrote: post #11
mholmes680 wrote: post #2

"Their estimates did not include potential costs and investments required to deploy the technology." well, of course not... because then there would be no dramatic teaser headline. Accenture money grab here - presumably they've positioned themselves accordingly already?

They also cite "run some processes, like finance reporting". How would storing this data in a blockchain have less overhead than an http server? Or even a torrent? It seems like a hammer looking for a nail.

The discussion was around trustworthy data, so I think they want proof that a page served up and stored was in fact the actual page served up and stored, for later audit. HTTP doesn't give you that. Bittorrent doesn't give you that. But blockchain can, if you pay a fractional coin to store the hash of the page in the chain forever. With a reference to the page and to the transaction, you can then later determine whether the page is intact or has been modified. And for bonus points a signature could be stored as well.

Re: Blockchain could save investment banks up to $12B a year: Accenture

#27

Post by mcintyre1994 »

mholmes680 wrote: post #2

"Their estimates did not include potential costs and investments required to deploy the technology." well, of course not... because then there would be no dramatic teaser headline. Accenture money grab here - presumably they've positioned themselves accordingly already?

Banks spending billions on complex technical processes could save billions if they replace those systems with a new system and you ignore all costs associated with implementing and running that system. Well yes, but..

Re: Blockchain could save investment banks up to $12B a year: Accenture

#29

Post by aarontyree »

Headline - 4.22.23 - The world banking market continues to struggle this spring. While blockchain financial services looked promising at the beginning of the decade, funneling as much as $12B per year from the human powered Financial Services sector, many viewed this as contributing to continuing wealth inequality. The "Decentralize and Replace" movement continues to grow. Many smaller banks have already folded, while larger banking institutions lobby for stronger regulations against decentralized blockchain technology...

Re: Blockchain could save investment banks up to $12B a year: Accenture

#30

Post by scrumper »

bdamm wrote: post #25

They talk about "reconciliation". Is this the practice of moving actual money following a bank-to-bank transfer of money? Or is this strictly an auditing function? Any bankers want to comment on this?

Reconciliation is the frequently manual process of making sure your records match mine, and vice versa. It's burdensome in finance because of the proliferation of systems used at various stages of a trade, and the number of parties involved as well.

Edit to expand on that a bit: it means making sure that every party involved in a trade has identical information. For a straightforward trade like an equity done on an exchange, it's more of an exception process. For more complex transactions where there are more data fields, it can be a very heavy process. Rough estimates put cost of reconciliation at tens of billions per year for banks, all of which has to be paid for somehow.

Post reply on HN