Every day, complex recordkeeping processes involving people and technologies quietly keep the world’s wheels spinning, influencing everything from banking to insurance to health care and more. Imagine the time, skills, systems, faxes and emails it takes to trade a complex financial instrument, involving 20 banks, each keeping their own ledger of the transaction, each having to reconcile with the other. But what if there was a shared ledger, where each bank had access to what Anthony Hardy of Franklin Equity Group calls one single source of truth.1 What if it could reduce all the necessary reconciliation steps?

“What if” is happening now. Blockchain—basically a decentralized distributed ledger, which records transactions in a transparent and secure manner—is disrupting various industries.2 You’ll often hear blockchain linked with cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether. Let’s say you use such a currency to complete a transaction. It is represented online as a block and is broadcast to every party on the network. The network approves the transaction and the block is added to the existing blockchain in a transparent and unalterable way. With the approval in place and the block added, the transaction is complete.

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