Use cases for blockchain in business

Use cases for blockchain in business

Many industries use blockchain technology today, including supply chain, trade finance, healthcare, identity access management, and banking: 

 1. Trade finance along with supply chain: Financial institutions, logistics companies, and IBM are working together on a new global system for trade finance using blockchain technology that is designed to track goods through the supply chain. Current payment resolution is cumbersome and largely a paper-based process that leaves companies waiting weeks or longer before they are paid for their goods. Because all of the members of a blockchain network have an identical ledger and smart contracts can trigger ledger updates automatically, payments can be triggered automatically upon delivery, making common disputes a thing of the past. 

2. Healthcare: Blockchain reduces the barriers that are involved in complex data sharing agreements between hospitals, physician providers, public health departments, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), allowing organizations to quickly and securely move patient data in a transparent and legally compliant manner. Healthcare use cases often converge with identity use cases (noted in more detail below), allowing individuals to easily approve the sharing of pertinent information without sharing non-essential or unneeded information. For example, if an X-ray is required, the parties interested in the result might include the insurance provider, a general physician, the X-ray technician, and the individual. However, the X-ray technician does not need to know that the insurance is provided by the employer. All the technician needs to know is you are a valid customer and are covered for the procedure. 

3. Identity: Blockchain provides encryption of data in the ledger and provides fine-grained controls that determine who can access the data. Imagine being able to decide exactly who can see every bit of data that you owned. For example, many people carry identification such as a driver's license, which contains information like name, address, and other data. At times, we provide this identification to prove our age to someone, and they need only to know one piece of this information: Our birthday. Keeping your identity on a blockchain allows you to delegate access of pertinent information when needed, while keeping the remainder private, thus reducing the risk of stolen or misused credentials. 

4. Fund Clearing: Multi-currency cash settlement systems are complex, involving a central clearing house and many disparate systems that must interact to detect the exchange rates and settle currency transfers. This paper focuses on implementing a fund clearing application as an example. We use a blockchain to resolve the exchange of funds in a timely, secure, and transparent manner. The Composer business network allows network participants to process inter-participant payments, thus replacing a traditional clearing house. We assume that the participants within the network are financial institutions that accumulate and submit one or more transfer request items to other participants. These transfer requests are placed into the business network, and when a batch transaction is invoked, all transfer requests for each banking participant are accumulated into a series of aggregated batch transfers. Each batch transfer details the required net settlement between each banking participant for the contained array of transfer request items, based on the currency of the creditor bank. Because of the popularity of IBM Z in banking, we describe integrating with a full-featured banking application running in CICS.