Blockchain, self-service and single digital platforms are the key trends we are seeing across industry verticals (media, financial services and insurance) at the moment.

Blockchain

Blockchain is a centralised, distributed ledger. Its most famous use is Bitcoin to track all the individual ‘bits’ of Bitcoin.

In Insurance it might be a list of all insurable assets. In media the chain can store media assets. In Financial Services it can store equities.

You can do some interesting stuff with Blockchain – such as verifying that no asset is insured more than once. Or you can break an asset up and insure parts of it (e.g. multiple insurers cover a single asset). Blockchain could also be one of the building blocks to help create peer-to-peer insurance. Blockchain could ensure (no pun intended) that an asset is fully covered and there is mutual trust through the contract feature, that when one party pays out, everyone will.

Blockchain would be the ideal technology for a rights database across media companies – each time a track is played, the play-out company could add a record to the Blockchain, and at the end of a period it would be simpler to aggregate all plays of the track.

You can also assign contracts (I prefer the term ‘logic’) to Blockchain assets – i.e. insurance can automatically be claimed upon a specific condition. For instance, when a Police report is filed (for lost or stolen property). Or crop insurance could be activated once a weather forecasting company reports that it has rained every day on a specified place/ has been dry on a location for a specified period.

Self-service

The Internet has created an efficient model of customer service that was previously impossible: enabling customers to help themselves.

It’s far cheaper, and more convenient, to service a customer online (this includes mobile and wearables) than face to face. Whether this is for a bank branch, selling insurance or selling advertising packages. Self-service is the silver bullet to how Google and Facebook make their revenue.

At Endava we are helping customers transform long, inefficient processes into self-service offerings for their staff or customers. Or even better – end consumers. These processes are often so engrained into an organisation that it’s difficult for them to redesign them as self-service. We have a method which helps the organisation to redesign them.

Single platform

Despite the web being only mass scale of fifteen years or so, many organisations have a multitude of CMSs (Content Management Systems), Customer Databases (or CRM systems), analytics providers, media libraries (or DAMs – Digital Asset Management Systems) across their web platforms.

We have developed large, digital platforms for customers for over ten years. A single CMS (Content Management System) with a single Customer Database (or CRM system), single DAM and so on. Our approach is to wrap these systems into an API, with full support for API developers.

We’ve just finished a business case for a large corporate customer to consolidate their entire digital platform. There were immediate cost savings and long term benefits (flexibility, reusability, time to market).

If you would like to discuss any of these trends any further, please use the comment form below, or contact me directly.