# The Role of the CFO of an Industrial Company: An Analysis of the Impact of Blockchain Technology
## 4 Analysis of the Results
#### 4.2.4 Improvement of Capital Provision and Reduction in Capital Costs  
The CFO, in his role of managing the financing portfolio of a company, is provided with a new instrument for corporate financing by the possibility of blockchain-based tokenization of assets to be traded on capital markets. By capturing telemetric data and the simultaneous verification by the parties involved, potential investors gain the data security they demand to invest in previously illiquid assets--in a highly granular manner. This allows not only the securitization of accounts receivable, as in the case of factoring, but also the securitization of entire production facilities and their individual components. Consequently, by displaying and tokenizing individual machines or silos as digital twins on the blockchain, an unchangeable and complete audit trail is generated that records the utilization of an industrial component and allows the subsequent investor's rate of return to be calculated. This complements the aforementioned profit center logic. Therefore, in the environment of Industry 4.0, the securitized machine or silo do not only autonomously perform management in regard to accounting, reporting and auditing but also independently control the own capital provision by facilitating availability on the capital markets. So far, the securitization of such granular commodities has not been economically viable due to the high costs associated with legal structuring or auditing. The legal reorientation of legislation that can now be observed, for example in Liechtenstein, renders it possible to set up and issue singular capital goods in an economically sensible manner. Additionally, high administration costs will be largely omitted, which will make high audit costs obsolete. Thus, companies can automate the issuance, sale and administration of granular capital assets. In line with the conducted interviews, the CFOs of industrial companies and small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) are able to significantly reduce debt capital costs, ensure faster and cheaper on-demand refinancing and significantly increase the underlying investor base. In the long run, the dependence of industrial companies on a small number of banks will thus be reduced. In the future, it will be private or institutional investors who ensure sufficient financing, together with other industrial companies that finance each other. In this way, capital goods can be off-balanced in order to contract the company's balance sheet. RQ3: What Is the Impact of Blockchain-Enabled Integrated Business Ecosystems on the Role of the CFO? The blockchain-enabled data integrity facilitates new forms of inter-organizational and inter-industry collaboration, serving as a backbone for applications in the fields of e.g., Industry 4.0, Mobility and Energy. Previously costly and incompatible intermediate stages of the business process, caused by incompatible ERP systems, data silos, different company policies and a lack of trust,are thus merged and harmonized over the entire business process lifecycle and are monitored by the conditions of a smart contract. Hence, the blockchain's characteristics of transparency, immutability and cryptography are the cornerstones for the emergence of inter-company and inter-industry collaboration. This creates a high level of trust among participants of integrated ecosystems, permitting a high degree of automation with auditable parameters and simultaneously reducing the need for human intervention to a minimum. For a CFO of an industrial company operating under the influence of the Machine Economy, these benefits are of great importance in order to enable all the different actors such as humans, companies and machines to network and transact with each other on an inter-company basis. The resulting interoperability leads to an outward reorientation of the CFO's company, enabling organizations to be part of a globally networked economy, potentially leading to an economic paradigm shift.