Rebuilding Enterprise Processes with Blockchains and Smart Contracts

Transcript

good I hate following exciting ideas likes lock-it and Cujo and all these guys makes me feel a little bit out of place but for those that I haven't met this week since I've been here my name is Matthew Stoke I'm from Rubik and if you haven't heard of Rubik before rubik's is a team based out of Toronto at Deloitte we've been working in this space for the more than a year now about 13 months or so and our goal is essentially to position Deloitte as being kind of the most forward-thinking professional services organization specifically on this context on this space and blockchain technology in the world we have this concept that Deloitte which you know we often brush off as

just being like a corporate slogan as one they call it and and I mean it it made me think about this type of environment in this open-source community and its really it's compelling to watch you guys and to watch this community the amount of transparency and openness and collaboration that happens here people essentially building ideas and just giving them away to other people to participate in we find out very compelling our team has made a particular focus of building collaborations with the types of organizations that are active here and we've had kind of a number of conversations over the last several months with many of you our goal is to continue building those collaborations see how we can work together and we're doing that in a couple of ways we're

also kind of building this internal concept at Deloitte that I like to call kind of our internal open source community which is quite rare for us to build collaborations in different parts of the world so we have Deloitte people in Canada in the US UK Luxembourg Italy South Africa China now all working together because we have come to realization that there's something really important happening in this space so this past year has led us to learning a lot and I think it's been pretty reflective and we've heard this boats from the community as well as from our clients we're pretty proud to say and I think we can boldly say that we're pretty significantly ahead of our competitors when it comes to paying attention and being active specifically on the topic of blockchain I mean we started off looking a Bitcoin we're now very focused

on aetherium and we've learned a lot before we had any client interest we were diving in and making an effort to understand we had a team that was very intimately learning the differences between Bitcoin and aetherium and some of these other alternative technologies that have popped up under this umbrella of blockchain technology figuring out what it meant for us what meant for our clients what was the difference between a private implementation of like a federated blockchain versus a public version like the etherium Frontier Network and that's kind of led to an interesting role I mean we we are a professional services organization so we're it's our responsibility to react based on what our clients are interested in and in some cases that's a multitude of technologies that all have taken on this categorization of blockchain

companies which of course I think is an oversimplification of what we're talking about because there's so many obvious variations and differences between these offerings so we've made an effort to be relevant to be able to explain these concepts to our clients to even be able to do testing and integrations of different types of these technologies but beyond our role as consultants we've also started to shift our attention and say how can we build solutions for ourselves and for our clients that are meaningful and in that process we've had to really decide where is it that we want to spend our focus and our effort and although there's a ton of diverse client interests across the board what we've been continuously hearing from clients is that smart contracts that sound appealing and in all honesty

there's still a big big misunderstanding and enterprises - like what a smart contract is but this buzzword has been out there probably more so than aetherium as a title but smart contracts are very talked about in enterprise and private implementations as a testing environment is very talked about an enterprise so that's where we started we've taken on a role of pushing this forward being a an organization that's very much public about the fact that we believe in this technology and we want to see enterprise adoption of it we've done everything from writing papers to holding seminars to doing education of clients and most recently we've actually started building decentralized applications and test environments with our clients so we ourselves are recognizing that this is a capability that is important

we're starting to train people to do that and hire people to do that now rubik's is it's kind of all of that encapsulated and are in the process of our experimentation and learning we particularly came to appreciate the value proposition of aetherium and the capabilities that aetherium had that none of these other platforms seem to have so by coincidence I mean it's about our team happens to be from Toronto birthplace of aetherium which we're very proud of home of Vitalik and the recently almost successful Toronto Blue Jays I noticed Nick Dodson still wearing its Blue Jays I don't know if he's in the room but more specifically our development team in Toronto and now with

growing members kind of around the world we've been working spending countless hours working on the C++ implementation of etherium we've been reporting bugs into the open-source community and we've been testing how to create kind of a comfortable private testing environment for clients to build prototypes on this on that client we've deployed our POC to write smart contract prototypes for use cases for everything from loyalty points with clients to digital identity we're doing one right now in healthcare we've tested one in document management and corporate governance so we're really kind of focused across the board and that's why we want to be present in this community and connect with companies that are doing these things because we're not here to reinvent what you know the bright minds in this room are

already doing so that's kind of our objective we're always trying to like continuously learn get closer to this community and it's been very reflective on how we operate because we're a very traditional large organization and you know being close to an open-source kind of collaborative community like this has started to impact how we're operating and it's noticeable in the way that we're working kind of cross-border with colleagues across the world you know this concept of a distributed team is extremely common here it's extremely uncommon for us but now we're starting to like live that a little bit more and then we have calls on a weekly basis with developers in other parts of the world that work at Deloitte that are starting to learn this technology and work with us to build solutions and that's like an incredible change of culture and DNA for an organization like

Deloitte quite recently I mean we've been trying to position Rubik as being like Hubb for that coordination and that development and effort and training of people to really start paying attention to this so that we can start developing capabilities internally so that we can start contributing back because I think I mean the one biggest impediment here is not the value of the technology by any means we all know that it's valuable and it holds enormous promise but the biggest impediment is how do you scale it how do you have enough people to go and deliver it to the clients that want to try it and that's where we think we can play a big role Deloitte is obviously an enormous global organisation and scale as one of our big strengths so if we can provide that to this technology you know that's incredible in this

process we've looked at a lot of implementations because we've gotten this car this question often are you just talking about this or are you actually doing anything and I think it's pretty reflective when an organisation is not only talking about this to their clients but doing something for themselves and we've been looking at kind of two major areas where this technology we think is going to be extremely impactful to our business and we're testing two of these concepts right now one of them is the concept of cross border billing we're building a prototype solution right now we to give you some context I mean Deloitte as offices in 150 countries around the world and we all interact and transact with each other extremely regularly you know that's you couldn't invent a more perfect test case environment to try and build a smart

contract implementation I mean right after me presenting today another presentation that I don't like to proceed because they're gonna be probably a lot more impressive than me as balanced and you know that's the type of technology we see as being extremely impactful for that type of environment I mean apart from that most of you know Deloitte is the largest audit firm in the world so our we've made a business for for over a century in auditing companies and their financial transactions and the reports that they release to the public I mean you can imagine what it means to us to think about an etherion future you know what what is the role of the auditor in a future where smart contracts you know operate financial transactions on a large scale who has - do you need a human to check those

things or is it inherently built into the technology that things are accurate and verified and confirmed such that we have to question the role that we play in the market and what's the value proposition we're now bringing as auditors so we're starting to play around we've started to think about solutions that we can implement to allow auditors to maybe more effectively read in and see the data on the blockchain and just presented in such a way that's understandable to them rather than being the people that are actually going out and doing this manual testing you know a traditional auditor would be pulling it an invoice and going to find the into the transaction on a general ledger and having to like physically compare those two things that becomes completely irrelevant as you know when when this becomes kind of the standard so those

are the two big projects we're working on internally the the second piece I think another interesting part of it is that aside from our large auditing practice we're also extremely established as a tax compliance and reporting organization we help organizations on a large scale report their taxes to their local governments and I mean depending on the audience this is kind of a mixed message but we also we often talk about regulations and how regulators are going to react to the implementation of these types of technologies we see this as being an incredibly powerful tool to enable governments to more effectively and more cost-effectively you know apply government compliance and Taxation that it could be built directly into a smart contract as to what level of tax needs to be you know added to a

transaction such that there's now a third party the government taking their cut of corporate taxation for example so all of these tools I think are going to allow us to change the the rhetoric and change the dialogue not seeing this is like a threatening technology to governments but really an enabling technology that allows them to really capture transactions on a scale that they've never really imagined before so broadly speaking on aetherium I don't think I need to convince this audience by any means about the importance of what you're doing here but I do want to bring a perspective from from Enterprise we're often in front of clients on a regular basis doing these types of discussions and seminars and I want you to know that your movement is impacting the world and that impact is

really starting to accelerate and I think you know DEFCON 2 if that's what they're gonna call it next year I I would be surprised if it's in a room this size because I would be surprised if this holds the amount of interest that will be there next year the acceleration in this space is going to be enormous and it's reflective by the fact that organizations like ours are here I mean we're proud to be kinda one of the Trailblazers from our industry coming into this space but I very much hope that by next year all of our competitors will be here with us and all of our peers and other industries will be here with us because this is going to be impactful so we're looking we're looking at that very carefully and I and I mean beyond Deloitte like one thing I try to clarify for people is the the

people that you may have met here from Deloitte there's a few of us in the room this is not a project that got you know handed to us this is not something where we got tapped on the shoulder and said you got to become the blockchain guy at Deloitte every one of us here and I speak kind of on behalf of my colleagues we all came into this space with a very deep personal interest and passion for the technology and apart from the obvious like competitive and the competitive reasons of Deloitte wanting to be involved in this space I think I speak for all of my colleagues when I say we're genuinely interested in seeing this technology evolve and seeing how we can contribute to that evolution and in just leveraging the fact that Deloitte has an enormous brand power and scale that could potentially help this week

has kind of led me to a lot of realizations that I'm very glad I was here for not that it needed to be said but there's an in this this room contains probably the greatest collection of minds working on a single topic anywhere in the world right now as far as I can tell the brainpower in here is unbelievable and it's rare to see a group like this that is so organically grown from people from all over the world from different backgrounds and different fields that have all kind of come together with a genuine passion for transforming how things happen for the betterment of the future not for any personal interest you don't hear anybody here talking about how they're gonna create you know the next uber the next day of India they're talking about how they're gonna create this technology that anybody can leverage that anybody can kind of

benefit off of so I think it's really powerful we've heard from unbelievably brilliant teams I mean I mentioned slaw kit I'm looking forward to balance talking looking at companies like gnosis and auger and you know the the multitude of companies we've seen over the course of this week it's very obvious that there's something important happening here I mean I didn't see Roman today but I'd be remiss to not mention hockey third camp for those of you missed his messaging earlier this week and all of these things are going propel the etherion vision and we're just hoping that as an organization we can play a small part in that big picture today our team has been very focused on this face but in all honesty we've been overwhelmed by client interest you wouldn't imagine how many

companies out there want to know more about this and how few people there are out there to tell them about it and you guys are the community there's not enough of you to feed to meet that that need and it's real and it's happening so we're hoping that we can scale up and drive the experimentation and adoption that we think is necessary amongst enterprise and seeing Microsoft president this event is extremely encouraging to see that there's other kind of large organizations being participial participating in this now all of that to say I think I have a different message that I want to leave you with you you all come into this space so the majority of you come into this space from a technical background but I think there's a different role that we as a group can play we need to start growing an understanding for

outsiders and observers so that when they look in here they know what's going on and they understand how it's going to impact their future there was a good blog post written by a meant colleague of mine Isaiah Syed on the con on the topic of blockchain technology broadly but I mean specifically on aetherium when you're looking at a fast evolving technology like this that really has a fundamental ability and potential to change people's lives what happens is there's a new vocabulary in a new language that evolves with it all these these terms that are being coined kind of as you go things that make a lot of sense to this room and things that are meaningless to people who aren't part of this space and new language evolves in radically different ways with new technologies and it is often what leads to the types of confusion and fear and

apprehension that people see or that we notice when a new technology is brought onto the market I mean a good example is when the automobile was first released to the public you know the automobile was this brand new life changing concept and then people heard the term combustion engine and then people were afraid that they were about to step onto a bomb that was just about to explode because the word combustion engine was meaningless to them it was a scary term and I think it's pretty analogous to what's going on here and we've seen what's happened to Bitcoin over the last six years in terms of the media spins and the media the Media perception of what bitcoin is and we've seen what that's done to the public perception of that space and luckily with aetherium I think we're at kind of the beginning of this explosion

and I think it's kind of up to this community to start taking control of that taking control of that messaging before that messaging gets framed by someone else because that messaging can be framed positively but it can just as equally be framed negatively and that will have a big part to play and how well adopted and how well received potential in this technology is I don't know if anybody noticed the article that was released yesterday about the Microsoft Azure announcement on Tuesday I thought it was kind of funny I was reading through it and the way the articles written is that Microsoft is working with a company based out of Brooklyn who you might know and that this company is working on the underlying technology of Bitcoin I mean I don't know if Joe

and the team at consensus are aware that they're working on Bitcoin but now the media and the public see it that way language is important and perception is important and it's kind of up to us to frame how that language is being used when this when describing what's happening here so keep that in mind as you go out and you talk to people a good example that we like to point to is is the term trustless in in this context and in this room the word trustless is an extremely valuable component of this technology it's seen as a feature of this technology and it's obviously an extremely important obviously creating interactions and transactions where you don't need to trust the other side of the transaction but you go to an ignorant bystander say the CEO of a bank that you're trying to sell your solution

to and you tell him that your technology is trust list and he'll tell you that he doesn't see the value in creating something that has no trust in it you know it'll be perceived differently and there's a lot of kind of language and lexicon around this space that can be perceived that way so just keep that in mind as you go out there I don't want to take more of your time than that but in the spirit of collaboration I mean our purpose and being here is really to connect with you to find out about the projects you're working on and find out how we can help find out if there's a way for us to put you in front of a client if there's a way for us to contribute to what you're doing or if you just want to share ideas and see if

Deloitte can somehow fit into that that's why we're here so there's several of my colleagues in the room here you'll notice walking around after if you get a chance to connect with one of us please do and we're really here hoping to be in a blurs of this and contributors to this so just let us know how we can help and we'll try to do that okay thank you very much