Opportunities and implications of blockchain in Australia
Workshop playback
The growing realisation that blockchain technology has the potential to completely transform the structure of financial services has created significant global interest, and we envision exciting times ahead for Australia’s potential to assume a global leadership role.
Joel Lipman, FSI Innovation Leader at Deloitte, and Jesse McWaters, Project Lead, Disruptive Innovation in Financial Services at the World Economic Forum, co-facilitated a workshop in April 2016 with 40 leading representatives from Australia’s regulators, incumbents, government, and technology community.
The workshop kicked off with the World Economic Forum report on the Future of Financial Services report – How disruptive innovations are reshaping the way financial services are structured, provisioned and consumed and our focus was to better understand the Australian and global efforts around distributed ledger technology, highlighting next steps as Australia pioneers this space. It was agreed that in Australia we have a unique opportunity to collaborate.
As such, it was also agreed that Australia needs:
- A very clear national statement of intent is required, not just around innovation and fintechs, but around the purposes of blockchain and how Australia can take a global leader position
- To enable forums for collaboration with the regulators, incumbents, innovators and technologists
- Demystify the language of blockchain. Once the jargon is removed its value can extend beyond financial services to the rest of the economy, so Australia as a whole, can discover how blockchain will benefit the nation.
