Blockchain innovators may have seen significant investment by major financial institutions in recent months, but the head of the International Monetary Fund recently gave support for other banks to join the bandwagon.
[bctt tweet=”The head of the IMF recently gave support to join the blockchain bandwagon.”]
Reports by Financial Times last week said IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde advised banks not to fear the blockchain or its potential implications for the financial sector.
“Many of you have heard about not only bitcoins but blockchains,” she said at a banking conference in New York, “and that unbelievable technology that underlies the bitcoins of this world at the moment and how incredibly convenient it will be to actually generate trust and identify players and whatever pseudo they decide to use.”
“And many of you in the industry are actually worried that those technologies are going to massively disrupt the current industry. Pause for a second.”
She went on to state that banks should not fear the impact of the blockchain as long as they are willing to take control of how the technology molds the industry.
“If those new technologies and as long as those new technologies are going to abuse, take advantage of, the yield for anonymity, I think the banking industry has quite a few good days ahead of it as long as it takes ownership of those issues of capital and culture in order to actually restore that trust without which you see no trade, no transaction, no business can take place,” Lagarde continued, according to reports.
Her remarks follow a recent flurry of investment by some of the world’s largest financial institutions in blockchain technology and startups exploring how that technology can be applied on a broader scale in the financial system.
They also came following analysis from Magister Advisors, which calculated that blockchain innovators are set to receive $1 billion in investment within the next two years.
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