Rwanda, the world's largest supplier of tantalum, a rare mineral used in devices like smartphones and laptops, faced a challenge in proving that every bag of tantalum ore was mined, transported, and processed under OECD-approved conditions, without any child or slave labor. The existing tracing methods involved tagging materials and filling in paper forms, which met the OECD rules but didn't provide actual traceability. It also generated a costly mountain of paper with room for errors or fraud. The challenge was to create a system that ensures tantalum is mined, transported, and processed under approved conditions with an unbroken chain of custody.

Change Healthcare, one of the largest independent healthcare technology companies in the United States, operates one of the largest healthcare networks in the country, linking 900,000 doctors and 5,500 hospitals to 2,200 payers. In 2017/18, the network handled nearly 14 billion healthcare transactions and claims worth $1 trillion. However, the American healthcare system, which Change Healthcare is a part of, is plagued by inefficiency, fraud, and waste. Patients, providers, and payers seldom see complete, up-to-date healthcare records. Incompatible file formats, data silos, and privacy concerns all hamper the free flow of information. Consulting firm McKinsey estimates that U.S. healthcare could save up to $450 billion a year by using updated processes and technology. Change Healthcare wanted to play a leading role in this transformation, by extending its Intelligent Healthcare Network with blockchain technology to provide a faster, better experience for all.

Honeywell Aerospace, a global provider of avionics, engines, systems, and services, wanted to create an Amazon-like marketplace for used aircraft parts. The existing process of purchasing used aircraft parts was outdated and time-consuming, often taking days or even weeks to complete a transaction. The websites put up by vendors were basic and lacked crucial information such as a part’s condition, pricing, and availability. The main challenge was the lack of trust in online transactions due to the heavily regulated nature of the aviation industry. Each part sold required certification from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies, and each part must be documented with a complete history of its ownership, use, and repairs. The goal was to cut purchasing time from days or weeks down to seconds and to connect each physical part to its digital pedigree.

Mindtree, a technology consulting and services company, identified two major challenges in the retail and banking sectors. In the retail sector, the decreasing rate of redemption in loyalty programs was a significant issue. Nearly $100 billion worth of points remain unused annually, which translates to missed opportunities to engage consumers and a balance sheet liability when compared to the cost of marketing and maintaining the program. In the banking sector, the merchant onboarding process was tedious and time-consuming, taking more than 20 days. The process involved high risks, sizable investment in external agencies for third-party verifications, and lacked a standardized system to ensure vendors comply with regulations such as anti-money laundering, Know Your Customer, and Know Your Customer’s Customer.

ScanTrust, an enterprise SaaS platform that connects millions of products to the Internet by giving each of these products a unique digital identity in the cloud, wanted to enhance its offering in supply chain traceability. The company aimed to help their client, Cambio Coffee, bring more transparency to their ethical trade business. Cambio Coffee, a direct trade organic coffee company, wanted to provide their customers with a way to trace the journey of their coffee from harvest in Peru to shipment, to roasting in Shanghai and then to delivery to their home. Each stop on the journey needed to be recorded on a tamper-proof system to validate their claims of building a direct link from coffee farmers to consumers.

Dubai, under the vision of Dubai 10X, aims to stay 10 years ahead of other world cities in terms of technology. One of the initiatives under this vision is the Digital Silk Road, a platform to ease worldwide trade. The platform aims to solve the global trading system’s key issues–high costs, low trust, and lack of transparency–with blockchain technology. However, the process of registering to import or export goods in Dubai was neither smooth nor easy. It was a lengthy process that touched on many authorities. For export, the process took even more steps. All these processes were paper-based and time-consuming.

Deutsche Börse Group (DBG) is a leading global exchange organization with a track record of innovation in information technology in the financial sector. DBG started to engage in the blockchain subject during 2015 and identified more than 20 use cases across its business units. Given the fact that blockchain was – and still is – in its infancy, to quickly gain internal knowledge, DBG selected a few use cases, relevant for its core business, for deeper analysis and subsequent realization of Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs). For the time being, DBG does not expect its core securities and derivatives trading business will shift to blockchain based trading systems, due to their large throughput and ultra-low latency requirements. DBG concentrated instead on use cases in the post trade arena and identified potential for blockchain applications in the area of clearing and settlement of securities & cash. Blockchain can improve the operational efficiency in these areas, i.e., shorter settlement times, reduction of reconciliation efforts, more efficient asset servicing, etc. In the long run, certain clearing and settlement functionality will likely materialize via blockchain being supported by clearing houses and CSDs to manage credit and counterparty risks.

Credit unions are increasingly being targeted by fraudsters, particularly through the call center channel. Traditional knowledge-based authentication questions have become vulnerable, leading to a rise in account takeover attacks. The process of member identity authentication across various touch points, including the call center, drive-up, and lobby, is fragmented and time-consuming, creating easy targets for fraudsters and causing frustration for consumers. The challenge was to find a more secure anti-fraud solution that could streamline the authentication process, reduce operational costs, and improve the member experience.

Poste Italiane, the Italian postal service, has evolved into an online marketplace offering financial products, logistics, insurance services, and online payments. To maintain its central role in the ever-changing world, Poste Italiane prioritizes innovation to support new products, processes, and customer experiences. They saw an opportunity in the market to support companies within their supply chain with customer acquisition and retention. However, the traditional postal system is bound together by an expansive and complex supply chain, resulting in tech sprawl where there are too many programs that are not interoperable. This means the programs can’t communicate with each other and share data. With the plethora of programs and lack of interoperability between them, the management of the accounts and the rules on earning rewards are not clear.

The U.S. insurance industry was facing a significant challenge in regulatory reporting. With 50 state regulators requesting data in various formats, often with short deadlines, insurers were struggling to keep up. The data they were able to submit was often outdated by the time it was reported, making it less useful for regulators. The industry needed a more efficient and secure system for data collection and sharing. The American Association of Insurance Services (AAIS) decided to tackle this problem by inviting carriers and regulators to brainstorm a solution using design thinking. The group came up with the idea of a blockchain network.

Abu Dhabi, one of the richest cities in the world, was facing a challenge with managing the land deeds for the 375 sq. miles on which the modern cityscape is built. The process of creating a land deed record involved multiple steps and could span up to six years to complete. There were multiple external stakeholders and internal municipal departments involved at any given stage of the land deed process, and they all leveraged disparate systems and applications. This led to friction in document sharing and potential for errors or confusion among the stakeholders in the current paper-based ecosystem.

The National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) is America’s largest trade association, representing 1.3 million members involved in all aspects of the residential and commercial real estate transactions. Members belong to one or more of approximately 1,200 local associations/boards and 54 state and territory associations of realtors. All of these organizations are independent, even though they work together. NAR was looking for ways to better serve their members and felt that analyzing members’ engagement would help them achieve this goal. Unfortunately, member engagement events were only available to the association where the event occurred. Getting over 1200 CEOs to agree to give up control of their data and processes by switching to one common database sounded unlikely.

The process of onboarding B2B suppliers is slow, costly, and fraught with risks and errors. It involves a lot of paperwork and verification from various departments and third parties. This creates friction and delay between buyers and sellers. The process is also difficult to keep up with when any vendor undergoes a move, reorganization, merger, or acquisition. The whole process takes around 45 to 60 days to approve a new supplier. IBM and Chainyard saw this as a problem that blockchain could solve.

Large organizations have always struggled to get visibility into their data. Frequently, data comes in many sources and formats while also being siloed across the organization. DLTs add ledger data and metadata to the mix. Similarly, consortiums need to interoperate with each other. Yet organizations often use disparate tools for logs, metrics and tracing. All these are deployed on different clouds or on-prem. Then they build their own tools to take data from the ledgers and put it into a SQL database. Consortiums may include competitors who don’t trust one another, so they don’t want to share data. But, if no one shares data, it can be challenging to determine if an organization has a problem or if it lies in the network.

In Cambodia, 78% of the population does not have a bank account, yet over half own a smartphone. Despite the stability of the native currency, the Khmer riel, most transactions are conducted in American dollars. The National Bank of Cambodia (NBC) wanted to modernize the country's retail payments system, promote the use of the national currency, and reach the unbanked population. The existing banking systems used by various banks and third parties often had compatibility issues, leading to inefficiencies. The NBC was interested in exploring whether a blockchain-based system could handle transactions faster and at a lower cost, thereby promoting wider use of the riel.

Bosch Research was exploring the Economy of Things, where IoT devices will need to buy and sell to one another. The first challenge was creating a secure platform to support automated micropayments between 'things'. This suggested distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) such as blockchain. However, blockchains don't scale well. Reaching consensus on a transaction takes time. And tiny IoT devices have limited power, memory, processing, and connectivity. They certainly can't run heavy code. The question was how any blockchain could possibly work around all these constraints and how Bosch could help pioneer the standards needed for IoT devices to buy and sell among themselves.

Sony Global Education identified the need to create a more comprehensive, open, and trusted system for recording the education and training credentials of Japanese citizens. The existing system had credentials sitting in silos, each requiring a different process for validation. Sony Global Education envisioned a system that accurately records how individuals perform in academic and training settings and then controls access to this recorded information. This would give businesses and educational institutions a more complete picture of candidates’ backgrounds and help them pick the most qualified individual for each job opportunity and program admission.