To tap tomorrow's distributed ledger tech, firms must act now

WITH all the noise surrounding distributed ledger technology (DLT), you'd expect participants in financial markets to be racing full-bore to get ready for it. But many are not. With DLT, the ledger has one shared and constantly updated vision of the truth, synchronised across multiple sites. That changes the need for a central intermediary. DLT generates a secure, immutable historical record and a full audit trail. A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger.

Presented almost daily with new claims about DLT's disruptive and revolutionary potential, some executives have begun to wonder when they'll actually begin to see some benefits from the technology.

Financial market participants know DLT is coming. About 80 per cent of executives at financial institutions surveyed by Bain & Company believe the technology will be transformative, and a similar percentage expect their organisations to begin using it before 2020.