The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) released a discussion paper on blockchain that looked to better understand the new technology and how it can be used in financial services; key takeaways from the paper include the ability to cut costs and remove certain back office operations to streamline processes and increase the speed of reconciliation; while there are many potential benefits, the FCA still wants to ensure the risks don’t outweigh the benefits; the FCA is also looking at how they might regulate blockchain, they typically regulate the application of technology but to ensure what they are calling “sensible development” they might consider regulating the actual ledger technology. Source
