Corporate Finance, DeFi, Blockchain, Web3 News
Corporate Finance, DeFi, Blockchain News

Digital Assets Will Profoundly Transform the Financial World

Interview with Marcelo Garcia Casil, Co-Founder & CEO of DXMarkets.


Marcelo Garcia Casil
Marcelo Garcia Casil
DXMarkets integrates blockchain technology into enterprise-base d financial processes, increasing efficiency and reducing costs. The firm supports the finance function to embed disruptive technology into its business cycle, increasing operating margins and generating new revenue streams.

Can you tell us more about yourself and your company?

I graduated in Buenos Aires, Argentina as an Information Systems Engineer. In there I also had a small web agency back in the early days of the Internet, when building custom websites was in high demand. I then moved to London in 2005 where I specialized myself in capital markets, working for investment banks across different business areas like fixed income, equities and money markets. Eventually, with Barclays, I relocated to Singapore in 2013. It was around that time when I started experimenting with Bitcoin, building home-made miners and trading on the different exchanges available back then. Eventually I concluded that Bitcoin (and blockchain) was going to drive huge changes in the financial services industry, and I decided that I wanted to be part of that transformation. That’s how DXMarkets was born, initially as a trading platform for digital currencies which then evolved in a financial services company.

Fast-forward to present time, our company is now fully focused on blockchain technology for capital markets. Our flagship product is a platform to digitalize investment-grade physical assets to make them tradable as financial instruments. We also have a closed-loop payment solution that can disintermediate the consumer payments space. Both products take full advantage of blockchain technology.

I’m also quite active in terms of speaking at events and giving presentations. I think it’s a great way to share insights and to connect with like-minded people. This is a fascinating industry right now and I’m very excited about the prospects of how technology will transform it in the coming years.

What impact do you think digital assets will have on the financial industry?

A lot has been said about the potential of blockchain technology and the vast number of use cases that this distributed ledger technology can be applied to. Out of the many, I’m most bullish about digital assets, or more specifically, about physical assets that are digitalized in a blockchain.

Trading of physical assets is a high-friction business and is often marred by cumbersome procedures, paperwork and manual processes that add up to costs and transaction time. It seems obvious that moving these assets around digitally would be much more efficient, but this hasn’t been possible to do in the past in an efficient way, not until the recent emergence of blockchain technology.

Now this becomes even more powerful when you’re talking about investment-grade physical assets. Take fine art as an example. It is a very appealing asset for investors who want to preserve their wealth in the long term. Fine art has strong fundamentals, and as an asset class is uncorrelated to other major asset classes like stocks, bonds or paper-traded commodities. However, investing in fine art is very expensive (fees in double digits!), and doesn’t really fit with the standard investment software and interfaces that most private banks and family offices use.

Do you think blockchain technology can boost fine art investment?

Here’s the thing: asset managers are presented with a dichotomy. On one hand they have a great asset class that would be a great hedge in their portfolio, and that many of their clients love, but on the other hand they would have to pay fees that are off-the-charts and there is also the risk aspect that they would need to manage separately and manually just for this type of asset, which makes it even more expensive. This is why only about 10% of wealth managers who want to have fine art in their portfolio actually do so. In other words, if fine art was as efficient to trade as stocks or bonds then the potential increase in fine art investment could be as high as 1000%. Global fine art trade would skyrocket from $64M to $640M! Blockchain technology can unlock this potential, and we, at DXMarkets, are actively working to achieve this goal.

I personally believe that, once digital assets become a common thing, the financial world will be transformed profoundly. The impact will be comparable to when e-mail replaced regular mail and boosted worldwide communication. It will be the beginning of a new era.

DXMarkets is betting big time on this vision, and we’re building the very first platforms to enable companies to take full benefit of digital assets. We’ll start with early adopters and then incrementally move into the mass market. These are very exciting times!

How can companies benefit from this technology today?

For smaller and medium-sized players, investing in R&D may not be viable. In this regard, partnering with start-up companies can be a fast-track approach to quickly testing and validating use cases at a low cost. Even large corporates who may not have their own innovation labs can take advantage of the agility that start-ups have through co-creation and other means of collaboration.

Like fine art, there are many other types of physical assets which would benefit from being digitalized using blockchain technology. For instance, DXMarkets partnered with a UK property developer to apply our technology to the real estate market. Any company dealing with high-friction assets can take action and benefit from using blockchain technology today.

Any final remarks you would like to make?

It is probably the hottest topic within FinTech right now. However, I’m wary of the hype that many like to create, forcing blockchain technology into use cases that don’t really make a lot of sense. There is a great deal of misinformation in this regard. I believe that it’s vital for companies to test and validate the viability of their use cases by building prototypes before committing their budgets to what could potentially amount to a significant waste of time and money.

You can visit DXMarkets website for more information www.dxmarkets.com

Cet article Digital Assets Will Profoundly Transform the Financial World est apparu en premier sur Fintech Fusion.
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Jeudi 21 Juillet 2016




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