The future of finance is in real time

This post was originally published at TechCrunch.

In a world of decreasing size, and rapidly increasing technological development, the financial sector needs to keep up at the same pace. While physical supply chains have improved to keep track of the digital world, the financial supply chain has not kept pace. The race towards real time financial services involves a wide array of stakeholders and possibilities, ranging from common standardization to reengineering underlying processes and protocols through blockchain technology.

So far, much of the hype in fintech is concentrated around the front-end through P2P-payments like Venmo, Facebook Pay and Snapcash as well as mobile payments like Apple Pay/Wallet and Android pay. These solutions changes the dynamics of the customer interface but are mainly built on existing infrastructure. Either the banks or the card networks. However, in a world where physical goods can delivered within the same day, expectations for real time payments are rising.

For companies like Amazon, which operate on a near zero-margin philosophy, efficient working capital management is crucial for a well-oiled value chain. This applies to both large volumes of small- to medium-sized transactions, as well as clearing and settlement of large value payments across global value chains. However, not only the process of debiting one bank account and crediting another will benefit from increased speed in the overall payment process. Real time accounting and reporting could potentially reduce fraud and money laundering as well as give companies better control of their liquidity.

Speed in payments is not only a competitive advantage for traditional value chains, but will also have a great impact on the internet economy, where time to market is essential. The delay in payouts from for instance Apples app store is as long as 60 days. This time delay could mean the difference between life and death for an app developer, and that money should probably be used to acquiring new users as soon as possible instead of being stored on an intermediary bank account.

For emerging markets, real time payments would enable a smooth transition from a cash-based economy to a digital payment world, by potentially leapfrogging the process of establishing centralized clearing and settlement functions.

With the rise of the sharing economy, or more precisely stated an on demand economy it is likely that a larger proportion of the future work force are freelancers. A transition to real time would allow workers to get paid as they go upon completion of a task directly to a bank account with all required tax reporting requirements in place. This could be done weekly, or even daily.

These are only a few examples of how real time financial services would have an impact.

Today, 18 countries has implemented real-time payments, with another 18-30 underway. This is mainly done by upgrading existing infrastructure. For this to work both national payment infrastructure and a central real time system, as wells core banking systems need to make the transition to real-time. This is a costly process with large up-front investments as well as increased operating costs for 24/7/365-operations. There is also the issue of cross border payments, which is acknowledged as one of the harshest points of friction for international commerce, where the European Commission has launched a pan-European payment clearing and settlement project.

In addition to the incumbent-driven journey towards instant payment processing, blockchain technology provide multiple possibilities for real time payments through both the distributed ledger as well as the possibility to create smart contracts. The latter would potentially enable real-time verification of pre-defined trade conditions through digitized smart contracts. In addition to solving the friction related to large value payments for global value chains, blockchain technology would, in theory make trade finance available to SMEs that would otherwise find it difficult to obtain credit approval.

These approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but can easily co-exist by utilizing ISO 20022 as the message container combined with the block-chain technology as a ledger of ownership to confirm the change of ownership. With a vast number of unknown variables related to this approach, banks like WestPac, ANZ and Commonwealth Bank of Australia experiment with the Ripple protocol for real time cross border payments integrated with existing payments infrastructure. Australia is not alone on this, banking giant Barclays recently signed an agreement with Swedish blockchain-startup Safello for a proof of concept to explore how the blockchain could be used in traditional finance.

In a world where the banks are at risk of becoming a commodity, the ability to offer real time financial services could strengthen the position of incumbents in an increasingly smaller world where availability and speed are essential to stay ahead of the curve.