Australian Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can reap benefits from the shift from traditional banking to digital assets, they heard at a CRN-hosted roundtable in Sydney recently.
ISV leaders at the IBM-sponsored gathering heard that Australian finance companies’ interest in digital assets continues to evolve, with Australian banks working on or gearing up to enter this space. Australia’s Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) program was launched in August with $180M of funding over the next ten years to develop and investigate emerging digital assets.
Roundtable attendees heard from Christopher Howes, IBM Head of Digital Assets Infrastructure, Asia Pacific and Japan, about the role of digital assets in enterprises and how they can be leveraged.
“Digital assets are representations of a value or right that may be transferred or stored digitally using digital ledger technology (DLT),” Howes said.
“The variety of different digital assets is broad and covers currencies, tokens such as securities, or mortgages. But they can also be non-financial assets such as art, gaming, merchandise, music, identity or even virtual real estate,” he explained.
Leading respected financial institutions such as banks and major investment houses like Goldman Sachs are looking at investments in cryptocurrencies and other digital assets, Howes noted. There is evidence that the ability to purchase goods using cryptocurrency is influencing some retail sales.
Australian ISVs can look at China to see how adoption can play out. “Digital currencies are here,” said Howes. “In China, almost all purchases are made using digital currencies through platforms such as WeChat and Weibo. Those platforms, as well as QR codes and other tools are used daily by citizens for almost every transaction with cash very much a bit player.”
Australia’s regulatory environment is one challenge for ISVs looking to take advantage of uptake of digital assets.
Another challenge for ISVs is the creation, deployment, securing and refining of solutions that take advantage of this digital assets.
At the CRN roundtable, attendees heard how IBM platforms and tools enable ISVs to tackle these challenges while avoiding long onboarding process and complex integrations with existing business systems.
IBM users include Australian cloud-based call recording and conversational AI company Dubber. Dubber’s technology captures conversations from many sources in a single platform and provides insights on that conversational content.
Dubber is used by one of Australia’s biggest banks to detect customer calls that could be deemed to be non-compliant. Unlike other methods of traditional monitoring that only allow a sample set of calls to be monitored, Dubber captures conversations across voice, video, text and messaging.
Dubber COO James Slaney described one recent use case with an enterprise customer that automatically detects non-compliance within voice conversations.
“Dubber’s platform enables an enterprise to record any communication from any source and then overlay Dubber AI functionality across these digital assets to automatically detect if any call is non-compliant. In the past, analysis at this scale wasn’t possible. With Dubber, compliant activities across all communications is dramatically broadened via the platform's access to record and centralised storage of the digital asset,” Mr Slaney explained.
A key challenge is security. “As organisations start to understand that they can instantly turn conversation to data they want to know where that data is held. Is it secure? Is it protected?” said Ant Withers, Principal, Cloud ISVs, IBM.
Dubbers’ integration of IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services – which stores keys for cloud data encryption protected in a dedicated cloud hardware security module – enables its users to manage access controls relating to call data.
The encryption keys can be held by the customer, so IBM doesn’t have access to customer data.
With more and more digital assets being held online, careful consideration of who has access to keys and the scalability and flexibility of cloud-based digital assets platforms is important.
Attendees at CRN’s roundtable saw opportunities to harness voice-based digital assets in multiple industries including finance and health, including for identification, to improve regulatory compliance and enhance business efficiency.
For those ISVs that tackle this securely and efficiently, digital assets offer myriad ways to help businesses build revenue and improve customer outcomes.
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