Accenture: Blockchain Has Great Potential, Currency Needs to Go

In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, technology consulting firm Accenture directors Owen Jelf and Sigrid Seibold argued that blockchain technology will reshape the financial sector. As seems to be an ever growing trend, however, the two contend that blockchain technology should be stripped from its internal currencies.
As part of growing number of financial service providers, Accenture’s global managing director of capital markets practice and the firm’s director of digital capital markets efforts openly embrace blockchain technology for the improvements in efficiency it could bring.
In their op-ed, the two claim that the technology underlying Bitcoin could vastly improve the process of clearing and settling trades. As such, Jelf and Sigrid Seibold see a lot of potential to replace current cumbersome front and back office practices.
They write:
‘For the world’s capital markets, with hundreds of billions of dollars and according underlying assets swapped daily, blockchains offer the potential for greater efficiencies and less infrastructure across a number of marketplaces.’
As part of a clear trend among financial firms, however, the Accenture directors believe that Bitcoin itself has one big downside as well. While acknowledging that it works well for some markets, Jelf and Seibold argue that bitcoin the currency brings an expensive proof-of-work process along with it. The authors of the op-ed, therefore, believe it might be better to rid of the money system baked into the Bitcoin protocol.
Jelf and Seibold:

This post was published at Coin Telegraph on 2015-07-30.