Category: Banking on Blockchain

As part of an emerging industry, blockchain companies face both legal and reputational risk in the public sphere. With the spectres of data breaches, litigious behaviour, and regulatory uncertainty ever present, how can blockchain companies best prevent crackdowns by governments, handle media scrutiny, and shape public opinion? We talk to our own insiders about how these companies can define themselves as good actors and improve public perception of their work.

 

Our guests this week are:

• Jaime Watt, Executive Chairman, Navigator Ltd.
• Mike Van Soelen, Managing Principal, Navigator Ltd.
• Danielle Parr, Principal, Navigator Ltd.

A portion of our discussion with Jaime Watt is transcribed below. Subscribe here to have the Navigator’s latest insights delivered right to your inbox.

Clare: I want to talk about reputation today because it’s something many blockchain companies don’t often think about but probably should. You’ve shepherded a number of organizations through high profile public facing crises and you often talk about the kinds of jeopardy a company faces. Can you explain that concept to our listeners.

Jaime: Sure. Generally speaking we see clients face three kinds of jeopardy. They face legal jeopardy, they face reputational jeopardy, and now they face a new kind of jeopardy which is moral jeopardy. So when you think about it in the old days, the old days are defined to be before the internet before Google, we used to deal with those Jeopardy’s consecutively. Deal with the legal jeopardy get that fixed up you’d move on to the reputational Jeopardy. You don’t have that luxury anymore. You have to deal with them concurrently. And for a lot of organizations that’s a problem because dealing with your legal jeopardy often increases your reputational jeopardy and dealing with reputational jeopardy often increases or exposes you to more legal jeopardy. And now to make things even more complicated, we introduce the first cousin of reputational jeopardy which is moral jeopardy. Looks a lot like reputational jeopardy but it behaves differently. It’s more intense and it’s much faster to come to fruition and to cause you problems and it requires a much faster response.

Clare: On our first episode Don Tapscott pointed out that the blockchain industry now operates in a wild west of sorts. And so I wonder what kind of advice would you give to blockchain companies on how they conduct themselves especially with all the hype that’s around the industry.

Jaime: I would say that the cliche ‘just because you can doesn’t mean you should’ should be the guiding principle. So just because it is the wild west and just because there aren’t regulations doesn’t mean that companies should take advantage of that. I think what they need to do is say not how does a responsible blockchain related company behave but how does a responsible organization behave and put in the kinds of processes the kinds of practices and the kinds of policies that make them a respected organization regardless of what their antecedents are or where they come from. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Clare: Absolutely. In our last episode we were talking about regulation. As a seasoned political adviser yourself do you think blockchain companies should be embracing regulation or should they be trying to find ways to self regulate. I mean what’s the what’s the best path forward.

Jaime: Well I think the best fast forward is to start from the proposition there’s going to be regulation. I just don’t think it’s possible that as this becomes meaningful part of the economy and a meaningful parts of people’s lives the government are going to abdicate what is their responsibility, which is to ensure that the marketplace is well ordered and it’s regulated. So regulation is coming in my view and anybody who thinks it may be very nice to be an idealist and think that this is going to escape that, I don’t buy that for one second. So if regulation is coming and I believe it is, the question then becomes what is the best way to achieve that regulation. And I would suggest the industry get together and propose the regulation itself rather than be exposed to regulation in a developed by bureaucrats who actually have no idea how things work. And you know through the law of unintended consequences may provide regulations which are actually quite harmful and unnecessarily restrictive. So I would say the enlightened practitioner in this area would say regulation is coming. How can we propose a regulatory regime that we can live with. It also delivers as against the public expectation and the public good.

We tackle the regulatory environment for cryptocurrency and blockchain – how it’s currently treated by Canadian law and where the big questions remain for Canadian regulators. In some areas, the industry is operating in a “wild west” without clear oversight or consideration for the public interest. Where will Canada land on regulating this new technology?

 

Our guests this week are:

• Dr. Shamsul Alam, Associate Dean, Dhillon School of Business, University of Lethbridge
• Jason Dearborn, Chairman, Dominion Bitcoin Mining Company
• Aaron Grinhaus, Partner, Grinhaus Law
• Zach Masum, Manager, Legal Services (Capital Markets Advisory), B.C. Securities Commission

According to Deloitte, 35 per cent of the healthcare industry is aggressively planning deployments of blockchain solutions by 2018. The sector receives mountains of data every day, including patient data, clinical data, and medical research. So what happens when you use blockchain solutions to give patients their data or help patients navigate mental health services?

Our guests this week include:

• Dr. David Jaffray, Executive Vice President, Technology and Innovation, University Health Network
• Dan Matlow, President & CEO, VitalHub (excerpt below)

A portion of our discussion with Dan Matlow is transcribed below. Subscribe here to have the Navigator’s latest insights delivered right to your inbox.

Clare: Before we dive into the nitty gritty of what your company does and the many platforms that it’s developed let’s look at 50000 feet up in the air. How do you think blockchain technology could help the health sector.

Dan: You know we started getting an industry research and started reading reports, that was a Frost and Sullivan report that came through and they did a good job of analyzing the health care sector into a couple different sectors, claims and billings was a predominant one. But the one that we honed in on was the interoperability of health records and the applicability of that health record, of a patient health record being interchangeable between, we call them providers. Providers are the delivery of care being doctors, community health centers, doctors offices, hospitals etc. But the ability to interchange that information amongst those in real time really provides a better quality of care and a really good cost benefit to health care systems. So those are the two hot buttons that we’re always after is can we get better quality of care extremely important and can we do it more efficiently and if you check up all those boxes it makes it makes things much easier.

Clare: Turning to some of the platforms that you’ve developed, public awareness about mental health in Ontario is perhaps higher than it’s ever been, with initiatives like Bell Let’s Talk and the work of many at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health. So CAMH estimates the economic burden of mental illness in Canada is about 51 billion dollars a year and your company is looking at some of the serious gaps in mental health care that results from inadequate access to available patient data. What exactly is the solution that you’re proposing.

Dan: There’s many different elements of mental health but the use case that we would like to suggest for potential customers or people that are interested in what we do is: I’m a mental health patient. Mental health care is different than for other types of illnesses. You hurt your knee you have taken x ray you need to do a blood test you need to do a cardiogram. We can use imaging or other systems to diagnose and to understand those situations. Mental health is primarily diagnosed through what we call assessment based technology where assessments are done on the individual, either self-assessment but usually done by care workers, those assessments are not completed in 30 minutes. They get completed over a series of extensive meetings and of observations at which point a diagnosis is done and treatment plants are put in place. Those treatment plans are you know vary in many different ways. They may involve pharmacy and drug interactions or just a fair amount of counselling or or self based treatments but those patients and those care plans are put in place and off they go. But that care plan and those assessments are locked in either this digitzed system within that community care access centre which you know in itself is overcrowded and that record can’t be shared at all. So we want that record to be shared. That that patient now presents itself at another community care centre or probably will present itself at a hospital emergency room, checks into an emergency room and that hospital has no understanding of that patient and that creates issues within itself. So the the the patient checks in there now they have to go get another site console to do an emergency assessment. That potential patient in a waiting area is clogging up the emergency room. It’s not good for the patient who’s under stress and so they try to give them best care as possible. They’re limited in the amount of psychiatric beds that they have in there so they’re trying to carefully screen if they get into the hospital. If they do get in there taking up a bed or someone else potentially gets in. And so there’s liability to the hospital if they don’t check the man so they’re careful that they do. They want them to come in so they might check people that don’t need to be there on the adverse effect, they might not check a patient in  that really does need to be in there and that patient potentially could do harm to themself or harm to others. And meanwhile five miles away is locked in that computer is that record of that patient. The emergency room could have that information. Blockchain represents the opportunity to get that record into the hands of that emergency room as effectively as possible.

Clare: So ultimately puts the patient back in the driver’s seat for control of their own data.

As we move from the age of the Internet of Information to the age of the Internet of Value, we are no longer relying on centralized networks. This trend isn’t only true of information – it’s true of the energy world too. Where previously we all relied on the local power plant for our electricity, today home owners can install solar panels on their roofs and hospitals can generate their own power. So what happens when you use blockchain technology to power the energy sector? Or vice versa?

 

This week’s guests are:

• Paul Ghezzi, CEO, Kontrol Energy
• Michael Marcovici, Co-CEO, HydroMiner
• Shidan Gouran, CEO & President, Global Blockchain Technologies

While the front-end experience may be seamless for the user, modern payment systems are not so modern on the back end. Cross-border bank wires can go wrong, remittance fees cut deep into money sent back to one’s home country, and assets can be seized by warring governments. In this week’s episode, we explore how payments on the blockchain ensure frictionless transactions that are cheaper, faster, and free of institutional baggage.

Our guests this week are:

-Miro Pavletic, Co-Founder and CEO, STACK

-Nilesh Dusane, Chief Revenue Officer, nanopay

-Karsten Arend, President and CEO, Just In-Genius

 

Views expressed do not necessarily represent those of Navigator or its affiliates.