Blockchain Pips Crypto is important for businesses, finds Envision Financial Systems

by Arthur · December 28, 2022

Provider of real-time investor record keeping solutions Envision Financial Systems has shared the results of its latest survey. The company surveyed business and technology leaders who advance securities processing and back office operations.

the’2022 Envision Big-Think Mini SurveyThe results show that respondents indicated that seamless connectivity between apps and artificial intelligence were the main issues they focused on for the future.

Respondents were asked to rate the importance of technology trends on a scale of one to five. On the scale, one was ‘unimportant’; three ‘neutral’ and 5 ‘very important’. Participants also rated the firm’s efforts to pursue them on the same scale.

The survey also sought to understand respondents’ views on the importance of blockchain for their businesses. More than half (55 percent) of survey participants said blockchain is important or very important. Meanwhile, only a quarter rated the company’s efforts as moderate or significant. Just under half of respondents expected blockchain to transform their business in the next five years.

Envision Financial Systems Survey results — Participants were asked to “rate the importance of these technological developments to securities processing/back office operations and how much effort your firm is devoting to pursuing them.”

Confidence in crypto has fallen

Brian Jones, Envision Financial Systems — Brian Jones, executive vice president of Envision Financial Systems

Brian Jones, Executive Vice President of Envision, explained his view of the results. He said: “For all trends, respondents rated importance higher than firms’ effort. However, the gap between importance and effort was roughly consistent across all trends.

“So while they may want to do a bit more to keep up with all the technology trends, respondents are at least quite comfortable with the relative distribution of their firm’s technology efforts across the different areas.

“While respondents were mostly positive about blockchain, they were more cautious about the relevance of cryptocurrencies. We believe many respondents’ skeptical view of the transformative potential of crypto may have been informed by the extreme levels of price volatility in the cryptocurrency market and lack of regulatory guidance when the survey was in the field. All the more so now, given recent events.”

Envision’s survey also asked executives about cloud environments for investor data. The results show that the respondents are currently strongly focused on security. Over two-thirds of respondents explained that they were most comfortable using a virtual private cloud hosted on a public cloud platform such as Azure or Amazon Web Services.

Placing investor data on a private cloud was found to be second, with half of respondents indicating they felt comfortable with that option. Fully public clouds were the least popular option of the three. Only 20 percent of respondents felt comfortable using them.