The blockchain is the financial challenge of our time. It is going to change the way that our financial world operates.

With private chains, you can have a completely known universe of transaction processors. That appeals to financial institutions that are wary of the bitcoin blockchain.

In financial services, the front end of the world operates at super-high speeds: comparative advantages are measured in fractions of nanoseconds. And yet back end processes - the amount of time you have to wait when you sell a stock before cash hits your account - can take days.

Blockchain technology, or distributed ledger technology, is just a way of using the modern sciences of encryption to enable entities to share a common infrastructure for database retention.

We all want a non-fragmented solution, but the utopian version of a single blockchain to rule them all is undesirable and impractical.

Our view is that sensitive, contractual, market-moving, private data should be kept private.