US$200,000-$400,000 according to system between companies has got com- DLT is coming fast BlockEx estimates. panies like IBM excited. So what does this blizzard of jargon, The first issues are, apparently, happen- So, for example, anytime a business pro- startups, joint ventures and pilots actu- ing any day now and similar efforts are cess requires an immutable, verifiable ally mean for the treasurer? The first underway at other companies to apply tracking record, a DLT solution is useful conclusion is that DLT/blockchain is these ideas to other forms of bank loan So, a new blockchain system from IBM happening many times faster even than and to private and public equity issu- and Maersk aims to manage and track was predicted a year ago. The objections ance. With Goldman Sachs having the paper trail of tens of millions of ship- to the use of public blockchains in finance announced that it already figured out ping containers by digitising the supply and commercial transactions have been how to automate half the 127 steps in an chain. DLT can be used for audit logging easily overcome by the development of IPO, robo-issuance is on the way. to satisfy regulators or for tracking which private blockchains. The technology has Enterprise risk management users are using which computer systems. been applied to an extremely wide vari- Finally, DLT is breaching the inner sanc- Walmart has run a pilot to demonstrate ety of markets and transaction types and tum of corporate MIS systems – the that DLT can be used to track produce in most cases several competing organi- ERP. ERPs do not look like ready candi- through the supply chain. And Sweden- sations have successfully completed pilots dates for DLT. The key principle of an based enterprise software provider IFS, and proofs of concept. ERP system is the central collection of has created a new proof of concept to demonstrate how blockchain can be inte- Can treasurers benefit right now from data for wide distribution, replacing grated with organisations’ ERP systems easy-to-access DLT solutions that imme- standalone databases linked to multiple in the aviation industry to track mainte- diately reduce the costs of their core pro- disconnected spreadsheets. The cen- nance and parts. cesses? Not quite. Will they be able to trally aggregated data is then available to this year? Possibly. Next year, definitely. all business processes. This is pretty In addition, in May, Hyperledger Project Do they need to understand the underly- much the opposite of a distributed ledger. member SAP announced SAP Cloud ing technology? It’s better that they do, Platform Blockchain, its blockchain-as- so that they understand the security However, because DLT creates a tracka- a-service solution. It’s very early days, implications if nothing else. ble, immutable record for any kind of but it seems designed for companies that transaction, from financial trades to are already using its ERP solutions, as But, like all new technology, within a very shipping manifests, from supply chains they look to implementing distributed short time, we will all simply be using to equipment maintenance schedules, a ledger solutions for data storage, man- interfaces that work better, faster and DLT enterprise solution that draws data agement, and other applications. If SAP more cheaply than the legacy systems and from the ERP and is then used to create thinks the blockchain works well with we will neither need to know how they a trusted transaction and data sharing ERPs, we can safely assume that it does. work nor will we care. www.eurofinance.com TREASURY PERSPECTIVES 2017/2018 // 35