Financial services will be “strongly impacted” by the rise of blockchain technology and the payment ecosystem as a whole will be the most interesting vertical to target for early blockchain technology successes — but the road to this success is long, says Frost & Sullivan’s global program director.

As with all other digital technologies, blockchain will have to “iterate year after year” to better contend with coming challenges, Jean-Noël Georges tells readers in an in-depth paper now available to download from the NFC World Knowledge Centre.

‘How blockchain will disrupt the payments industry’ explains what the blockchain is and how it operates, before discussing the impact it is expected to make on financial services and the payments ecosystem. The paper explores where the technology will have the most impact for payments — looking at use cases including mobile payments and digital cryptocurrencies — before examining the future of the blockchain.

“Blockchain is still in a nascent phase and most announcements are based on introductory projects and proofs of concepts, rather than concrete deployments at scale,” Georges says. “Success of blockchain technology will be based on confidence. As a result, security should be the heart of the system and infrastructure.”

Readers can download Georges’ 10-page paper, which provides a wealth of insight into how blockchain technology works and how it is expected to impact the payments industry, free of charge from the NFC World Knowledge Centre.

• This document is part of What’s New in Payments, a 104-page special report from NFC World that explores and explains the latest payment trends and technologies. You can download the entire report here.

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