vritti
Trending Now
March 2018
5
— Srinivas Nidugondi
The silly season is upon us, once again. It is, essentially, that time when
one looks back and reviews the successes and failures of the previous
year. It is also when one tries their hand at predicting the trends that
are expected to leave the digital payments space spellbound. Or not,
of course. Needless to say, if last year is anything to go by, one can
safely assume that 2018 is set to witness a fair amount of activity.
Now, onto the main feature…
Blockchain continued to excite and evoke
curiosity (and no, I am not talking about
bitcoin) in 2017 and this year promises to be
no different. Here's how-in so far, all deploy-
ments to date have focused on the remittances,
trade finance and insurance segment. This
year, industry experts are betting on the fact
that the scope will widen beyond straight
forward banking applications. Simply put,
apart enabling international remittances,
insurance management I see newer
applications including contracting becoming
mainstream. However, I believe that for small
value payments there may yet not be any major
advances. So (surprise, surprise), blockchain
is everywhere data needs to be shared.
In a nutshell, the question to ask this year
is-is blockchain the big disruptor for existing
systems in the remittance space? We'll
(hopefully) find out this year!