94% of financial services executives say boards now believe in blockchain, says Synechron survey

Synechron Inc., the technology, business consulting and digital services provider, announced in a press release sent to CoinReport, results of a distributed ledger or blockchain survey conducted by TABB Group. Results showed that 94% of financial services executives believe boards have bought into developing blockchain projects, with almost 87% believing they have enough budget to implement blockchain projects.

Synechron said it surveyed more than 200 senior-level, global financial services business and IT decision-makers across the U.S., the U.K. and Europe.

89% of senior executives believe, said the release, distributed ledger will be routinely used in the financial services industry by 2026.

The results suggest that in spite of several levels of action on distributed ledger enterprises, most financial services corporations believe in the long-term, ground-breaking prospective of distributed ledger and are just calculating how to take action taking into account resources, use case and business unit to accomplish maximum commercial value.

However, one of the main challenges for organizations employing blockchain today is a shortage of relevant talent. In the survey, 70% of the responded said they did not believe their corporations had enough human resource capable of executing distributed ledger technology.

The survey shows, however, that in spite of these challenges, more than two-thirds (67.4%) of organizations are getting actively involved in distributed ledger enterprises, with 13% of the senior executives stating they are putting together a team of distributed ledger experts and about one in five (16.7%) acknowledging a blockchain use case such as KYC, Trade Finance or Global Payments.

The release added that 15% of the executives stated they had already developed a pilot distributed ledger application, either on their own or with a partner company, and almost a quarter (22.7%) were taking part in a blockchain working group.

Interestingly, on the topic of regulation, nearly 25% stated they were waiting for regulatory direction on distributed ledger before taking action.

“however, perhaps, following recent regulatory guidance from FINRA, that may begin to change,” said the release.

Even though regulation serves as a hindrance to action, said Synechron in the release, only 16.7% of firms referred to regulatory direction as an issue, citing technology uncertainties and limitations as the issues they’re more interested in seeing addressed. The most important issue, which was cited by 29.3%, was interoperability (one distributed ledger solution being unable to incorporate with another using a dissimilar core infrastructure). This was closely followed by privacy (20.9%) and scalability (20.5%).

Synechron co-founder and CEO Faisal Husain

Synechron CEO Faisal Husain said in the release, “It is clear that many financial services firms are either seriously considering how to utilize blockchain within their organization or are already putting this technology into practice. However, with any new technology there are challenges to overcome. Our survey shows that recruiting the right people is one such challenge, regulation is another, and technical considerations related to the technology itself another. Companies will need to assess carefully how they approach each individually, and this will require knowledge across these areas to make the most strategic decision on how to proceed and to take action.”

Image credits:

Synechron logo – Via a previous press release

Faisal Husain’s photo – Courtesy of Synechron via PR firm Vested