Over the last few years, I have engaged with both the ‘true believers’ in crypto and the sceptics. In this highly politicised debate, the opportunity to assess, objectively, what unique capabilities are offered by Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to design innovative payment solutions appears to have been swept aside. Of course, there are gaps (scalability springs to mind) but we can expect many to be fixed as the technology is improved.

‘Core competencies‘ as a management concept were first proposed in the 1990 HBR article “The Core Competence of the Corporation” by C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel. In developing Information Technology (IT) strategies for companies in a past life, I have used ‘IT Capabilities‘ to capture new competencies derived from the use of information technology, for business leverage.

As an example, the use of artificial intelligence tools (or even simple ‘rules engines’ from the olden days), can enable a payment services provider to significantly improve KYC and risk assessment of payers and payees to meet compliance standards and regulatory obligations.

The unique IT capabilities offered by DLT and tokenisation can similarly be captured to help spur ideas that solve existing problems or even conceive new business models. I call these #DLTSuperPowers – simply to be less boring than ‘DLT Capabilities’! I’m hoping to offer a framework to generate dozens of new use cases that might land on fertile ground and find sponsors who take some up for trial, despite the reservations of sceptics.

I will be presenting these ideas at an online panel session next week with the Emerging Payments Association Asia, details below. I will share details in a subsequent post, watch this space!