Towards a new vision of customer identity management in European banking using emerging distributed ledger and cryptographic approaches: the case for and against blockchain

Abstract

This piece of work is aimed at arguing the advantages and disadvantages as well as the challenges of the blockchain technology and if this distributed ledger system, has the potential to replace current regulatory bodies and intermediaries in the financial services sector, specifically in terms of identity management and more generally. This would seem to have been the vision of the originators of the technology back in 2009/10. To create a self-sustainable, secure environment for transactions of monetary nature. In this piece of work, it is the intention to follow a specific argument in order to demonstrate that this “original idea” is not something which is likely to survive or become main stream. Rather, arguments will be made to demonstrate that likely there will be a hybrid of “old” and “new” emerging. The solution suggested to harvest the full potential of those new emerging technologies, amongst others, customer identity management, is to streamline existing processes by involving regulatory bodies in the process of setting up new services for transacting and managing identities, as the need for oversight, due to technological flaws, cannot be argued away completely.