Unlocking digital trust and transparency with blockchain

Elevating businesses with blockchain’s transformative potential, PwC offers insights and sustainable solutions, empowering companies to innovate with confidence in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Why deploy blockchain?

In today’s ever-changing business landscape, continuous innovation, increasingly enabled by emerging and autonomous technologies, is imperative. But it is also important to invest in the right tech for real results. While the value created by these technologies is clear — greater efficiencies, reduced costs, and improved customer experience, for example — they require strong governance models to retain employee, shareholder, and customer trust.

Blockchain technology enables organizations and ecosystems to codify trust. It provides a decentralized and immutable ledger for securely recording and verifying transactions, increasing trust amongst network participants while helping to eliminate the need for costly intermediaries. Better yet, it can help companies like yours enable new business models and revenue opportunities.

Why now? What’s changed?

Growing adoption and significant advancements since inception are positioning blockchain to become a critical enabler of enterprise innovation and trust.

Interoperability & agility

Blockchain solutions are designed to seamlessly integrate with existing enterprise systems, processes, and data sources while also enabling trusted interactions between external ecosystem participants. New integrations between different blockchain networks and legacy systems are making it easier to securely exchange information and assets — increasing the overall utility and value of blockchain technology. The resulting ecosystem can provide a strong foundation for companies that are looking to develop innovative apps and attract new customers.

Sustainability

Greater emphasis on corporate and social responsibility has encouraged leading blockchain networks to employ sustainability-first design mindsets. Many have adopted newer consensus mechanisms to reduce energy consumption and increase transaction throughput, making blockchain solutions more sustainable. In some cases, blockchain is also helping organizations decarbonize their existing technology stacks.

Efficiency

Blockchain operates on a distributed ledger, reducing the need for intermediaries, and consequently lowering transaction settlement time and costs. Historically illiquid and inaccessible assets, such as real estate or investment funds, can be tokenized and traded on blockchain-based platforms. These platforms, which operate 24/7, have a global reach, and do not require brokers or custodians, and allow real-time visibility and accelerated settlement at a fraction of historical management costs.

Regulatory environment

Regulatory clarity surrounding blockchain deployment is helping to instill confidence in businesses and institutions that are exploring and adopting blockchain solutions, and is encouraging other companies to follow suit.

In a world where technology, governance, and global dynamics constantly shift the ground beneath us, it’s time to consider your business’s next evolutionary leap. The future waits for no one. Let’s make your blockchain vision a reality.

Where blockchain is making a difference

Across various industries, blockchain is helping companies drive growth, reduce costs, and increase transaction trust and security.

Global payments

Blockchain’s identity and value portability features are transforming global financial processes and transactions across industries — from customer and commercial payments to global payroll and treasury management. Leveraging blockchain’s cryptography in global payroll processes can help reduce the risk of data breaches, unauthorized access, and tampering, enhancing the security of sensitive employee information. Further, it offers real-time visibility into cash positions and foreign exchange rate and interest rate fluctuations, enabling improved decision making.

Asset tokenization

Blockchain can facilitate the minting and exchange of digital representations of real-world assets, including currency, investment funds and real estate, to more seamlessly create, transfer, and track assets throughout their life cycles.

Process automation

Blockchain-based smart contracts can automate and enforce contractual agreements based on predefined rules and conditions, reducing the need for intermediaries and associated costs. These features are enabling faster and more accurate insurance claims processing and payouts, the secure transfer of patient data between healthcare providers, and transparency and expedient processing of purchase orders, delivery agreements, and payment settlements.

Asset traceability

Blockchain's transparent nature allows participants in the network to view and verify the recorded information. This transparency enables stakeholders to trace the origin, movement, and ownership of assets or information throughout its lifecycle, providing a clear audit trail. Beyond tracing the origin, quality, and safety of products, blockchain can also be used to verify ownership and authenticity of legal documents, contracts, and intellectual property.

ESG enablement

Blockchain can improve environmental monitoring and reporting, and it may offer a more sustainable alternative to legacy data and information systems to support an organization’s decarbonization efforts. Further, it can help provide greater access to quality and trustworthy financial services — payments, savings accounts and investments, for instance — to support greater usage in financially-underserved communities.

Technology and data governance

Blockchain’s immutable and tamper-proof records can help govern and instill stakeholder trust in other emerging technologies that are being increasingly adopted by businesses.

Why PwC

At PwC, we pair the right tech with the right solutions to help you gain a competitive edge. And that’s how we drive real results in a human-led, tech-powered world. Wherever you are on your blockchain journey, our business strategists and technologists can help you accelerate value creation. Whether you’re devising your blockchain strategy, establishing ecosystem governance and controls, developing or integrating a blockchain-based solution, or preparing for go-live — we’re with you at every step.

Using focused sprints, we bring a mix of code-based assets, frameworks, and templates to help accelerate value delivery. We can contextualize our capabilities for your overall blockchain maturity, and deliver customized services from strategy-through-execution.

We collaborate with leading technology and data companies to help accelerate innovation and power our clients’ business transformations. In the blockchain arena, we are collaborating with:

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) is a non-profit organization focused on creating equitable access to the global financial system through blockchain technology. Together with SDF, PwC can help clients accelerate development and deployment of blockchain-based solutions leveraging Stellar’s infrastructure. Key use cases for the Stellar network include: cross-border payments, asset tokenization, bulk disbursements, and more.

In collaboration with SDF, we developed two first-of-their kind Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Blockchain frameworks:

Blockchain Sustainability Framework: Evaluates the environmental sustainability of blockchain protocols and applies the framework to benchmark the environmental footprint of multiple blockchain networks, including the Stellar network. Our framework was featured during the September 16, 2022 United States Senate Committee hearing on the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, as well as the January 2023 World Economic Forum meeting. Read the framework.
Global Financial Inclusion Framework: Identifies the factors that render services or products financially inclusive to help financial service providers assess and enhance their social handprints. Read the framework.

Our R&D efforts push technological boundaries to solve real-world business needs. We conduct market research to identify priority innovation areas, collaborate with regulators, and work with public and private institutions to help develop groundbreaking proofs of concept (POCs) on public and private blockchain networks. To drive purposeful innovation, we complete the last mile of innovation together with our clients.

Contact us

Scott Likens

Chief AI Engineering Officer, PwC US

Kurt Fields

Director, Blockchain Lead, PwC Products and Technology, PwC US

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