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Brett King: Wall Street Should Be Scared of the Blockchain

October 15, 2015

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Brett King at the Huffington Post covered SIBOS Innotribe and did well to measure the heat in terms of banking and blockchain technology here:

Simon Taylor, one of the instigators behind Barclay Bank’s recent adoption of the blockchain and a panelist on the blockchain session, spoke about the reason Barclays is focusing on the technology

“The Blockchain could solve a whole host of issues, not least cost issues, and make life easier for Barclay’s clients. It’s our duty to aggressively understand the impact of this technology on the way the bank needs to work moving forward. If we don’t attack this innovation at the edges of the bank, then we can’t shape the control functions within the bank or help SME’s leverage off this new technology.”

Rumors at Innotribe suggested that Barclays is about to announce some major initiatives in NYC prototyping various blockchain applications.

Neal Cross, from Singapore’s DBS Bank Innovation Lab also sat on the morning’s blockchain panel and had an even more compelling vision of the technology’s impact on banks

“The big thing for DBS is that blockchain technology has the potential to enable businesses to interact without a central authority, and what should attract banks is that it comes pre-tested in respect to scale and security as the underlying infrastructure of bitcoin. The potential to reduce risk, reduce complexity and improve the trade finance value chain is something that DBS is partnering with a number of other banks on. If banks aren’t looking at leading technologies like blockchain, then they may not be able to survive the wave of disruption from the thousands of FinTech and technology companies coming their way.”

About Richard Kastelein

Founder and publisher of industry publication Blockchain News (EST 2015), a partner at ICO services collective Token.Agency ($750m+ and 90+ ICOs and STOs), director of education company Blockchain Partners (Oracle Partner) – Vancouver native Richard Kastelein is an award-winning publisher, innovation executive and entrepreneur. He sits on the advisory boards of some two dozen Blockchain startups and has written over 1500 articles on Blockchain technology and startups at Blockchain News and has also published pioneering articles on ICOs in Harvard Business Review and Venturebeat. Irish Tech News put him in the top 10 Token Architects in Europe.

Kastelein has an Ad Honorem - Honorary Ph.D. and is Chair Professor of Blockchain at China's first Blockchain University in Nanchang at the Jiangxi Ahead Institute of Software and Technology. In 2018 he was invited to and attended University of Oxford's Saïd Business School for Business Automation 4.0 programme. Over a half a decade experience judging and rewarding some 1000+ innovation projects as an EU expert for the European Commission's SME Instrument programme as a startup assessor and as a startup judge for the UK government's Innovate UK division.

Kastelein has spoken (keynotes & panels) on Blockchain technology in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Barcelona, Beijing, Brussels, Bucharest, Dubai, Eindhoven, Gdansk, Groningen, the Hague, Helsinki, London (5x), Manchester, Minsk, Nairobi, Nanchang, Prague, San Mateo, San Francisco, Santa Clara (2x), Shanghai, Singapore (3x), Tel Aviv, Utrecht, Venice, Visakhapatnam, Zwolle and Zurich.

He is a Canadian (Dutch/Irish/English/Métis) whose writing career has ranged from the Canadian Native Press (Arctic) to the Caribbean & Europe. He's written occasionally for Harvard Business Review, Wired, Venturebeat, The Guardian and Virgin.com, and his work and ideas have been translated into Dutch, Greek, Polish, German and French. A journalist by trade, an entrepreneur and adventurer at heart, Kastelein's professional career has ranged from political publishing to TV technology, boatbuilding to judging startups, skippering yachts to marketing and more as he's travelled for nearly 30 years as a Canadian expatriate living around the world. In his 20s, he sailed around the world on small yachts and wrote a series of travel articles called, 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Seas' travelling by hitching rides on yachts (1989) in major travel and yachting publications. He currently lives in Groningen, Netherlands where he's raising three teenage daughters with his wife and sailing partner, Wieke Beenen.

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