Implications and Trends for Financial Services

With an emerging area such as blockchain and blockchain-based assurance and attestation services, it is always difficult to know what to include as current news or current use cases, but several trends do appear worth of inclusion as current or topical news stories. The deluge of headlines and news around emerging technologies, specifically the 2024 efforts by US politicians to enact (or at least discuss) regulation around blockchain and cryptoassets, is making these conversations even more challenging to have. Implications and trends of any technology are invariably difficult to forecast, as the dot-com bubble illustrated to any analysts/investors in the early 2000s, but the pivot and push toward institutional adoption is evident. With tens of billions invested and entire firms and industries reorganizing service lines around these technologies, financial professionals and firms will need to understand what (1) the underlying trends represent and (2) how best to think of and analyze the implications of the said trends.