Blockchain in Finance, Healthcare and Supply chain
Tags: supplychain, finance, blockchain
Published: 2022-08-04 08:59:21

Since the official introduction of [bitcoin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin) in 2008, blockchain technology has significantly grown. It has become globally recognized as the first and most efficient decentralized peer-to- peer cash payment system that operates electronically. Many industries and organizations are presently realizing the benefits that the technology behind bitcoin stands to bring in various sectors of the economy ranging from, Education, processing and manufacturing, Medicine, finance, and other business sectors. With the decentralized as well as trusted nature of blockchain technology, it can, to great capacity, present new opportunities that will play a significant role in growing businesses towards success. Some of the challenges that blockchain technology help to address include security and transparency challenges, Risks linked to financial institutions, traceability challenges, huge operation costs of businesses, voting, and health care challenges.  

## Security and transparency challenge
 
Normal day-to-day business operations in the financial industry are often presented with transparency and security challenges. These centralized financial systems are always opaque, and their security relies greatly on intermediaries. It presents the risk that nobody will have an idea of all that is happening until the system gets hacked and suffers a financial loss. There are instances where organizations have fallen victim to funding embezzlement with little to zero knowledge of how to trace the movement of the stolen funds. Financial accounts records have often gotten altered to provide an illusion that the stolen funds were put to good use. The adoption of Bitcoin for blockchain technology significantly addressed this issue by providing a high level of security in the financial transaction as well as total transparency to monitor the movement of funds in the organization without the risk of the transaction history getting erased or manipulated. 

Blockchain technology ensures data is immutable. It makes it difficult for data to be altered in any way to meet bad actors’ needs. It secures the whole data, thereby making it authentic and correctly all forms. Given that blockchain adopts a decentralized nature, it gives it a rare quality of being trustless. In this case, the users do not have trust for the transactions being made to be secured. Blockchain uses cryptographic methods such as zero-knowledge proof makes it easier to proof information without necessarily revealing it. It also ensures that it separates data verification from data. 

Organizations in the finance industry can use this technology to conduct the verification of their users without having to access their data. This minimizes the risks and chances of breaches. 

## Risks linked to financial institutions
 
The financial industry is characterized by the provision of high-risk services such as loans to users. In some scenarios, tracking these loans often becomes a problem by the banks to the extent that they often engage third-party services to recover these loans. Blockchain technology helps in solving such issues in the financial industry by eradicating this risk. It does this by providing each stakeholder with a trusted node. These nodes will effectively enable things like; 

a. [Peer-to-peer transactions](https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/p2p-payment-systems). The peer-to-peer transactions eliminate the intermediaries since the stakeholders form both unstructured and informal network relationships. The trust relationship that they form enables them to proceed with the transactions or share resources efficiently. 
b. The nodes play a big role in recording the transactions and verifying them on the blockchain. This action significantly reduces the credit as well as the management risks that financial institutions incur.  
c. The nodes facilitate quick payments of financial transactions since they use smart contracts. The processing speed of these transactions is practically more than that of traditional financial institutions. Furthermore, the immutability state of the data increases the reliability of these transactions. 

## Traceability challenges
 
In some cases, it is easy for organizations to lose track of their transactions in the event that they are happening simultaneously over a long stretch of time and in bulk. For example, a company making huge deliveries do different clients globally at the same time. The company staff may get overwhelmed by the workload and may end up losing track of some goods before they reach the required client. Using a blockchain ledger, every moment of exchange of goods gets recorded in the blockchain immediately. An audit trail is often available that helps track the goods from the source. 

This blockchain technology provides a lot of security in exchange-related businesses. For example, organizations in the medical industry can use [blockchain technology in healthcare](https://medium.com/@elena_al/blockchain-in-healthcare-605fe97f0c6c) to track their product’s supply chain all the way from the manufacturer to the distributor. When applied in the art industry, for example, ownership of NFTs, it will help in providing irrefutable ownership of those kinds of creations. 

## Huge operation costs in business
 
Financial institutions spend so much to outsource as well as recruit experts who help in aggregating and amending their data. Recording data in financial institutions is often a tedious exercise that consumes a lot of time for the staff and a lot of financial resources in paying for the labor. Using blockchain and choosing the right blockchain development company will help reduce these costs as it reduces the manual recording of the transactions. The blockchain’s ability to ensure that all financial institution processes are streamlined helps these organizations save a lot of money. Blockchain equally cuts intermediaries, vendors, and other third-party entities that require payment to render their services. This way, operation costs are significantly cut. 

The saved expenses can get redirected to help other departments within the organization where blockchain application is quite impossible. For example, the machine maintenance department where company machines are serviced and maintained. Here technical knowledge is applied. 

## Voting and Healthcare challenges
 
Process such as voting is a well-known time-consuming process globally. The majority of the nations still use paper ballots involving queuing with each person waiting to vote. It is a time- consuming process that often gets subjected to delays and inaccuracies. Blockchain is the most secured and encrypted network that can get used to store the votes to be used during voting. The voters will then use smart devices at the convenience of their locations without going to the polling center to make ques. This also helps in saving public resources that could have gotten used. The network then processes the votes accurately and very efficiently. The results then get published in time, and everybody can view the results. It makes the voting process seamless and very transparent. Free from manipulation since every detail is transparent and recorded on the blockchain. Recorded for reference in case of dissatisfaction from the contestants of that particular leadership position. 

## Healthcare Challenges
 
Hospitals filling systems and recording of the data often consume a lot of time and, on several occasions, result in duplication of a lot of patient information. Digital transformation in healthcare will help the health industry by making it easier for health care records to get accessed with ease, thereby reducing the waiting timeframe of patients before they get served. It will also solve the issue of record duplication. 

## Conclusion
  
Blockchain is an unrivaled technology that nations can adopt to help run their affairs, both government duties and private duties in organizations. It is a proven network that has delivered on all aspects of security, accountability, costs, and time management. Organizations that embrace this form of technology get better placed to perform better. For example, financial institutions are able to save costs that would be used to pay intermediaries who would help in loan recovery measures. In the medical industry, companies can document their supply chain well since blockchain technology will help them trace the supplies from the retailer to the supplier. In the healthcare industry, hospitals can use blockchain technology to manage their records which will eliminate duplication. There are a lot of advantages that come with embracing blockchain regardless of the level an organization is placed. It can effectively work for both startups and well-established government and non-government corporations. With the above-presented pieces of evidence of the real-time challenges that blockchain can effectively address, it is a technology worth adopting and may in the future be indispensable in our day-to- day business operation.