The idea of Decentralization is utterly radical. It is extremely unusual for something radical to be adopted inside large companies. Since the Internet, the flow of innovation has been Consumer first and then Enterprise. That is why yesterday we reviewed the consumer oriented DAPPs starting to appear on the Ethereum platform.

However, if something totally radical solves a big and pressing problem within an enterprise, something that is a Board level priority, then it gets a budget and innovation may flow from those budgets.

So far we have looked at two such pressing problems and how a Decentralized Blockchain could be the answer:

Cybersecurity

Credit and Market Risk from Multi Day Settlement.

The other big pressing Board level problem is Regulatory Compliance. We have looked at the problem and everybody agrees it is big and ugly. Yet still we only see solutions that are papering over the cracks. This Research Note speculates on how a Decentralized Blockchain could be the radical solution to the Regulatory Compliance challenge.

To do this, we have to imagine a future where financial transactions are automatically sent to a Decentralized Blockchain. These transactions would be annonymized to protect customer privacy. The data would be available to regulators in real time. It being an immutable Blockchain, Regulators can be confident that the data cannot be changed to make it look good. Regulators could build tools to parse the real time feed to spot suspicious patterns.

Layers of cost would be eliminated. Mistakes would be made and fines levied, but they would be small because a) there would be no cover up possible, so it would clearly be an individual mistake and not a corporate mistake and b) individuals would be more careful to comply with rules if they knew that everything was immediately visible to regulators.

If anybody is working on this, please tell me.