The Blockchain is essentially a way to implement true peer-to-peer services. It de-intermediates relationships between parties (no 3rd parties, no governments, no external regulation).

Bitcoins are only one application of many to come. For instance, I know some banks are working on a common Blockchain service to settle back office transactions. In this instance, the Blockchain acts as a ledger. In the insurance industry, five of the world’s largest companies have joined forces in a pilot scheme to test the impact of Blockchain.

Zurich, Munich Re, Swiss Re, Aegon and Allianz have joined the Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative B3i, Rosie Quigley writes on Insurance Post . She also adds “the pilot testing scheme will aim to develop standards and processes for which insurers to follow so all within the industry value chain can use it.”

It is difficult to tell when this technology will hit businesses but with IoT starting, it is likely to fuel it even further and to accelerate its emergence. It will take years to mature but it will disrupt businesses and ways people engage with core services like banking, insurance, travel, etc.

Today, there are already more bitcoins than USD going to the Philippines... The Blockchain is a complex technology that most people will not understand but will use in their daily lives, much like the Internet. Only technical people know about IP addresses, DNS servers, etc... It will be the same for Blockchain services. 

Fintechs are the first companies having a crack at it. They are very new and fragile but very agile too. All financial service institutions have special programmes to monitor and anticipate what will come from it. They invest and support in most promising companies. Like Zurich, Munich Re, Swiss Re, Aegon or Allianz, they also set up their own agile teams to discover the power behind the Blockchain.

The Blockchain is a massive threat on all institutions as well as a huge opportunity. It may be used to cut operation costs as more intelligence will be layered onto the Blockchain. As an example, Ethereum, introduces smart contracts in the Blockchain. Further developing this approach and core backend systems such as underwriting solutions, back office settlement systems or claims management solutions costing millions to build and maintain will sooner or later become less relevant. In time, enterprises may view these core backend systems to a lesser extent as business differentiators than they are today. It may totally disrupt the value chain delivered by large enterprises such as banks or insurance for instance letting customer experience be an essential part of the value they deliver.

There will be companies offering simple but effective banking or insurance services running on the Blockchain. They will differentiate on customer experience, ease of use and pricing. To illustrate my thinking, I suggest that you try to subscribe to an existing Bitcoin service. There are a few running that will let you access the same Blockchain running in the backend but offering a totally different customer experience. I have tried “Coinbase” and “Mycelium”. Which one do you prefer?

In my opinion, with the Blockchain levelling backend capabilities (i.e. all companies will access the same capabilities from the Blockchain), customer experience is more than the future of CCM. It will lead the way companies differentiate one another from competitors.

In this context, traditional paper driven Customer Communications Management (CCM) will sooner or later become lesser and lesser needed. Tomorrow, the Blockchain is likely to replace traditional ways of communicating to customers, and the need to transmit documents will no longer be there. However, it is not yet tomorrow but it is certainly around the corner.

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