It’s likely you’ve heard these terms mentioned in the news recently, but unless you work in banking, these terms probably don’t factor much into your day-to-day work. Let’s face it – customer experience doesn’t often overlap with the world of financial technology.




See also: What is Blockchain Platform



Sending and Receiving Payments


Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies use the blockchain to send money from one person to another. It’s a secure yet transparent system that operates with no need for a central bank, allowing strangers to transact without needing a third party to oversee the transaction.



Blockchain application



Our modern banking systems are not perfect. Clearing and identity checking takes time. International payments can take a long time and usually come with high fees. Customers who are disadvantaged or disabled may not have a bank account or be able to get to a bank.



See also: Blockchain programing







Payments made through blockchain technology could cut out these banking-related issues, letting money move freely between businesses and their customers, with no banks or payment processors needing to act as middleman. It could cut payment processing times to minutes (in some cases, from days or weeks), and completely revolutionize processes such as clearing. In fact, change is already underway – Mastercard is even opening up its own blockchain as an alternative payment method.


Sending or Receiving Products


The Internet of Things (IoT) is getting bigger, and this technology combined with blockchain could allow for massive improvements in how customers pay for and receive products.


Customers commonly complain when they have paid for a product or service that they haven’t received. Those complaining customers are the tip of the iceberg of problems with dispatch and receipt of products – for every customer who complains, 26 remain silent. Those 26 customers are opportunities lost for businesses, as rather than highlighting service problems and giving companies a chance to improve on them, those customers just walk away.


As well as allowing companies to act proactively upon service issues, this means that businesses can gain increased visibility into their supply chain since they would no longer need to rely on customer feedback as an indicator that a process hasn’t worked correctly. This new insight into service failures could open up the potential for service improvement of a kind never seen before.

In future, businesses could even have the capability to take customer funds only when a product has been verified on the blockchain as received by the customer. This type of blockchain-facilitated process change could be used by companies as a strategic differentiator, helping to reassure customers that they won’t be at risk of losing out if a package goes astray.


Customer Record Keeping

We’ve all heard horror stories of companies who have failed to keep customer data safe. Whether it’s personally identifiable information, passwords, sensitive health records or even information that reveals political preferences, businesses and customers everywhere are rightfully concerned about the security of customer data.

As it stands, customers have to trust that companies only hold information about them that’s reasonable and proportionate when in reality, that might not always be the case. Not to mention that each time customers hand over their personal information to businesses, it puts them at risk of identity theft.

Companies like Civic are working on systems to store customer identity information on the blockchain, with that data secured in an encrypted form that customers can disclose as they choose. While the specifics of this are beyond the scope of this blog post, ultimately this could mean that in future, businesses wouldn’t need to hold the personal information necessary for customers to pass data security checks. Companies wouldn’t have to worry about keeping that data safe, clean or compliant as it won’t be held internally, and customers won’t have to worry about excessive or unsafe personal information being held by companies.

Beyond the treatment of customer identity information, there are possibilities for other types of blockchain-based record keeping too – for example, in healthcare. Factom intends to use blockchain to store healthcare records such as medical bills and patient-physician communications. The nature of blockchain-based records means that this information can be simultaneously secured through cryptography while ensuring that records made can never be tampered with.