TD Bank, the U.S. arm of Canada’s Toronto-Dominion Bank, in a recent survey of treasury and finance professionals found that only 6% believed blockchain to be a suitable area for investment. The bank polled finance professionals at the 2019 AFP Conference and collected a total of 329 responses.
While blockchain interest looks gloomy, about 92% of the respondents said blockchain presented at least one positive benefit to the payments industry. This number is slightly higher than last year’s survey figure by TD Bank, which found that 90% of respondents thought blockchain to be positive for the payments industry.
However, professional see some benefits of blockchain, especially for speeding up the payments processes (28%), improving cross-border payment efficiency (22%) and reducing payments fraud (22%). Last year the top benefit cited was stronger audit trails.
Although only 6% plan to invest in blockchain, 23% of respondents are willing to put money into data, analytics and reporting of treasury operations.
Other sectors ripe for investment include cybersecurity and fraud protection (22%), another 22% in artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotic process automation and about 16% in automating payment processes.
Of the total surveyed, about 40% of respondents said payments fraud and cybersecurity risk ranked highest on their threat list.
