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ABNAMRO runs over 30 blockchain experiments, also involving digital identity capabilities. Co-operation has been set –up across various coalitions, and use cases are running a lot wider than just the banking and payments industry. Academia, building-, and shipping industries are also involved. What are the typical problems to solve with blockchain technology, and why? Some of the practical use cases and scenarios ABNAMRO is involved in today.
ABNAMRO runs over 30 blockchain experiments, also involving digital identity capabilities. Co-operation has been set –up across various coalitions, and use cases are running a lot wider than just the banking and payments industry. Academia, building-, and shipping industries are also involved. What are the typical problems to solve with blockchain technology, and why? Some of the practical use cases and scenarios ABNAMRO is involved in today.
Well, as said, I am from a cyber security and identity and access management background. I'm doing that for AB in the corporate security office. So I'm not a blockchain person. I'm an identity person in blockchain land.
And to me, that's a pretty new experience, but I feel that identity just as Martin expressed in his presentation is helpful in blockchain land and blockchain can be helpful in identity. And I will present you first, what could be potential use cases and how to define them. And then four cases that we have been running in AB number.
Now, first of all, the world has been changing a lot. And I think that the trend that we see today is that a lot of things are mixed. The digital and the physical assets are mixing human and digital actors are mixing. As the internet of things is acting on behalf of a person. Then there is the financial values in other values and digital values are AC are mixed because data becomes a valuable asset more than ever before. As we just spoke, industry domains are also blown blurring. And PSD two is an important catalyst for that.
When the law says that banks should open up their backdoor for other industries, potentially non-financial industries to use their data and to originate payments in the bank's back office, without the bank being actually doing that. So that's a catalyst, but it already happens in the market and you can see it in shops as well. There are bookshops where you can eat and drink and buy the furniture. It's all mixing up and that's in the digitized world. Digitization makes it even worse because it's all location in independent and jurisdictions are mixed geographies.
Everything is mixing and I would call it the Dick. The big digitization blur. Also technology domains are blurring. As I see from the security where I work, that detective controls like fraud analytics and attribute based access management, which is all data driven processes and detection and predictives is all mixing as well. So the identity front door and the back door of detection are also blurring together because they're both using automated processing and analytics and artificial, maybe artificial intelligence in the future, societal domains are interacting with each other.
There are platforms and social and community areas. So big blur is the world that we're living in. And I was very astonished to hear everything as a service, as opposed to insurance function, a service. I found a document in a company where the legal guys were expressing their worries about the concept of everything as a service. That's obviously someone has invented now all these things and mixes and blurs are changing the needs for access and for identity. We need to cooperate across bigger and more diverse platforms and partnerships.
The level of assurance for your identity becomes more important. It's not just a log on, but you really, if you do your financial origination of payments, you need to know who is there more than ever. And they are very fine grained. Sometimes dynamic identity, constellations and ecosystems are developing and growing together and shared policies and agreements are the only way to make sure that you know, what ecosystem you are connecting to and what are the other domains and how you trust each other.
And in that case, you would need cross-sector governance when everything is blurring in the digital world, you need yeah. A bigger span of all your governance, because access governance is a matter of agreement and a matter of working together, of course, technical, interoperability, and standardization. Those are all trends that we can see. And as a response to the privacy worries, the bigger awareness for privacy self-sovereign assertions are also coming up and system to system setups. Like we used to do it. Silos identity in siloed organizations are not working anymore.
And what could help us in that case? And here is the big B word blockchain or distributed ledger technology. I'll use them in a mixed way, actually distributed ledger technology had as an original purpose to make sure that there was no double spanning in a peer tope network. That was what, what it was used for. And it could be done because all transactions were synchronized across all the nodes. And then you don't need a governance to the third, third party to manage and safeguard your data and the truth and effect. But it's done by technology.
So peer to pair availability and integrity of the data and information can be safeguarded, but is it, isn't it just another database? Some people would ask, well, it's a safe network. And if we look at the previous slides where you have to work across many partners and many domains and network sounds like a good solution. And also when you need all these governance across all these parties, if technology takes over part of that safeguarding of integrity and availability, that's also quite nice. Confidentiality is another thing.
You can make things confidential, but it's not necessarily, if you have a public ledger and everyone can needs to give their consensus and may potentially see all the data. And then as Martin also said, there are some issues with the GDPR, of course, the right to be forgotten is important, but I'm part on behalf of AB number in the ISO and NN, the Dutch normalization Institute for standardization of identities and privacy and security, the work group technical work group 303 0 7.
And we are really finding a lot of potential problems and issues with blockchains and digital identity and the privacy aspect of that. That's not easily solved. And of course, governance issues may always be there because someone has to provide the technology layer below all this, the infrastructure, although the, the logical structure doesn't need governance. Technically you need someone to make, to call if something is wrong with the technology.
And then there are some things that are also easily forgotten when discussing blockchain, we have various types that could be public blockchains accessible to everyone, and it's not necessary to know the identity of the people in your network, but they're also, and there's, they are called. They could be permissionless where access management is not managed, but it's just accessible. There are permission block change, where you have some identity or some access structure, although it could be anonymous.
And there are also, there's also a lot of confusion across identity concept with help of blockchains. So using blockchain to serve identity, but also there are also identity concepts to support access management on behalf of a blockchain, especially when you have a private blockchain authentication and access management is important. And of course, when you have many change, private change and it's going and growing, you would need maybe want to interact across the chains. And also the chain and the techn traditional technology may be needed to interact. So there are a lot of questions.
AB has been working with blockchain since two years. So we have done a lot of explorations in various fields, but those who are mainly the blockchain people and not really the identity people. And that's just about starting, I will move on and explain how we are working with AB in a second, but first the permission, blockchain and the permission, less blockchain, I think it's been mentioned before. Permission less means you need permission.
You need no permission because you don't need the, to know the identity of the payers in your network, no access model, and they are called public, but that's not really always the case. That's why I have it in brackets, data, integrity and availability arranged by cryptographic setup and not through central governance. That's a good value. And in a permission, blockchain, those are called private. They're often instigated by big companies and for their own purpose and maybe across set of peers, but it's not accessible for everyone.
And then you get the old IM problem that you need to define who can access, who can validate the data, who can update, read, get you, get the sort of roles in that framework. So again, you need to add identity to the setup and the governing of permissions and roles of beers in the network.
Again, that requests that you have, again, a shared central governance. So we are talking about distributed ledgers, but in effect you need a shared or central governance and not for the data integrity, but for the roles of the actors in the network. And then you're back home where we were before that blockchain coalitions are there. And IBM number is a member of two of those, the use cases for blockchain. When would we use a blockchain? And when is it not wise? Or can you do it without, there's something to say about the actors.
Usually you have multiple partners that don't know each other, or are not trusting each other. They have different industries as a background or different roles, and they have no persistent relation. They have no shared governance. They have no consensus and trust, but they need consensus and trust about the processes they shared. And they must be sure that the data is correct now.
And one of the use cases is for instance, when you have trade and you are, we are working with the Harbor of Rotterdam together in a, a program called deliver when we have to deliver flowers to the other end of the world. And a percentage of the containers is lost on the boat, on the ships at sea.
And well, of course, insurance is involved to make sure that they reach the other end, payments are done in advance or afterwards. And you can imagine that if you don't know where that is and all those partners have to see what is happening at a real time, it's nice if you have a blockchain, because you have shared connectivity, you have many partners. This is exactly the list of actors that you can think of that could be valuable in a blockchain.
But also there is something to say about the things that you want to do or store in the blockchain data or transaction information, process, information, and updates and assets. They have certain properties that make them very good to do in a blockchain. There must be proof of provenance. For instance, diamonds. If I have a diamond, the diamond is not marked. I can't validate where it comes from.
So if I tie it to an UNM, mutable, unchangeable, unbelievable consensus based Providence document, that could be a very good thing to store in a blockchain or use a blockchain for at a station, not even store it, but availability, immutability, and integrity, and uniqueness of the things you are attesting or are storing with help of blockchains and immutable audit trail. Whenever you need those, it's maybe worthwhile to look whether using the distributed technology could be a good case.
And of course, when you have many parties that have to provide documentation, the data, the information on the process steps and many geographies, because it's real time. And in, in finance, we have a lot of problems when the markets are closing in certain part of the world, and they're still open in one part of the world. And when it's all real time and in the internet, it's easier because you're not tied to the traditional bureaucratic processes. Okay. What does number do in blockchain?
We have an innovation department and we have about 200 people contributing since two years to anything with blockchain and a lot of P and we have 70 initiative that we have run very small ones, very big ones, CSO, clan, hip, and happening. So we have a clans and tribes and so on, and those are virtual communities that are all bringing in their own expertise. And many of them are from trade findings and clearing. And a lot of them are from the service security departments and they have their own place in the innovation center of the bank.
So they are department independent or department agnostic. That could be a problem with financing sometimes, but our board finds it very important that we run this.
Now, this is that a lot of companies that we are working together with the technical university of Dell, IBM, the R three consortium swift. Anything you see, there's a lot of them on, on various levels related to the technical infrastructure or to the type of blockchain we're looking at. And so that's really big. And I have almost lost track of what we are doing. Anyone who wants to know more on a specific detail of one of these, you can talk to me later now, what are some use cases, what we are doing.
As I said, we are a member of a few coalitions because it's about many partners from different areas working together. One of them is the Dutch blockchain coalition, and that's run by 5 25 founding partners. And all the big banks in the Netherlands are part of that. We have cooperation with the whole Netherlands dot Inc as I call it. It means that government is also there and there are parties, the identity providing the passport, the education universities. And it's a lot of cooperation other than in traditional it where we are competing. We are really working together here.
Now what we are doing, we have a work stream on identity because in the Netherlands, we have, we don't have a very good national E I D. And that's what we are trying to achieve really with pox. And we are working with sovereign this self sovereign identity. So I don't need to express why that's good for the consumers. Banks are traditional identity related partners. So then we have the R three consortium. I see that my time is running up and our three is a network for dedicated, for financial agreements and financial services. And that's really global.
So there are 200 partner partners, but a lot of mainly banks, 35 banks, and we're doing a big use case for knowing your customer. Then there's a use case for fungibility. Fungibility means that a product can be exchanged with other projects of the same type and a mono Aliza, for instance, is not fungible. If I give you half of the mono Aliza, it's not worth anything.
Now, if you replace that by a tokenization in the blockchain, it means you have your liquidity back because you can't sell the whole model. Ali are the whole castle, but you can sell parts of it. And that's easier for the trade people. There are a lot of use cases where fungibility is very important to make liquidity work. And this is one of the use cases that we are looking into. And the last use case I have is the diamonds and jewelry global operations management group.
They are located in ANW, they're working with the ANW diamond workers group and they log, they really log the diamonds on the blockchain or attestations for the diamonds. So they can be traced, double, double financing, double insurance can be prevented. They register to complete trade fee flow. And there was a lot of this prevents a lot of fraud. So from traceability, from the mine and to the ring, and we're not the only one doing that. There are a lot of other blockchain initiatives, there's diamonds, and there's even a diamond hackathon.
It has been in the beginning of this month in ANW to, to help the companies make these things globally work and prevent the fraud. Now, that's it. Any more questions here are my details. So thank you very much JBA. And I think it's interesting to see the, the various use cases going on.
And so, so I wanna wanna raise one very simple question, which might give me a short answer. So, so what will really disrupt the finance industry? So today's established finance industry.
Is it the technology changes or is it the agility or leg of agility of our, The agility that we can reach by using peer to peer networks and it, most of the time it's permissioned private blockchains, but it makes yeah, a lot of the traditional problems are gone because you're all looking at the same availability and integrity of data Across, but new players, which are then better and using technology actually do you you're good enough Right now. So we have a lot of possibilities to invest.
So, and we've been doing that for two years. So, so you're buying the startups when they are mature enough, Not buying them, but we, we have good developers, we, and we're really working together with them. So thank you very much again for your keynote pleasure to have you again here this year.
