The World Economic Forum’s analysis has yielded six key findings regarding the implications of distributed ledger technology (DLT) on the future of financial services:

1. DLT has great potential to drive simplicity and efficiency through the establishment of new financial services infrastructure and processes.
2. DLT is not a panacea; instead it should be viewed as one of many technologies that will form the foundation of next generation financial services infrastructure.
3. Applications of DLT will differ by use case, each leveraging the technology in different ways for a diverse range of benefits.
4. Digital Identity is a critical enabler to broaden applications to new verticals; Digital Fiat (legal tender), along with other emerging capabilities, has the ability to amplify benefits.
5. The most impactful DLT applications will require deep collaboration between incumbents, innovators and regulators, adding complexity and delaying implementation.
6. New financial services infrastructure built on DLT will redraw processes and call into question orthodoxies that are foundation to today’s business models.

The analyzed business use case are: a) Payments; b) Insurance; 3)  Deposits and Lending; 4) Capital Raising; 5) Investment Management; and 5) Market Provisioning.

These key findings are explored in depth in the The future of financial infrastructure  report, based on the use case deep-dives conducted across financial services.