The Pomp Podcast - Eric Piscini, Deloitte Ex-Head of Blockchain: Supply Chain Enterprise In Use Today

Episode Date: March 1, 2019

Eric Piscini is the Deloitte Ex-Head of Blockchain. In this conversation, Eric and Anthony Pompliano discuss all things Enterprise Blockchain, and applying Blockchain technology to the supply chain. ----- Join the Off the Chain newsletter. Pomp's daily email analyzes the crypto market for institutional investors. Simply, it’s the best crypto newsletter delivered to your inbox every morning. No frills. No bullsh*t. Just everything you need to know in a 3-minute read. https://offthechain.substack.com/ ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Eric Bassini is the CEO at Citizens Reserve and the former global blockchain leader at Deloitte. In this conversation, we talk all things enterprise blockchain and applying blockchain technology to the supply chain. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you enjoy it as well. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any

opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, I've got Eric here with us. Thank you, sir, for joining. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. All right. You have a fascinating background when it comes to the blockchain crypto world, because you actually started out at Deloitte working on enterprise blockchain solutions. So maybe just give a quick background on yourself and then you can go through some of the work that you were doing there. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. So I actually started at Deloitte

a while back during the financial crisis. I joined Deloitte in 2006, which is an interesting time to join a large organization. It was the financial crisis and I was working on closing banks. And so as part of that, obviously you are exposed to the financial crisis, exposed to what's working and was not working in our banking system and a few years later, in 2012, I started to look into cryptocurrencies. Back then the word blockchain did not exist and so we had to create a practice inside Deloitte which was the crypto practice. It was not blockchain back then. I did that with two other partners at Deloitte. There were three of us and we trying to convince our clients and convince even Deloitte internally to consider blockchain as

something that is really going to change the world. And I've done that for six years, from 2012 to 2018. When I left Deloitte a few months ago, the practice was 1,200 people, $50 million revenue, cutting across a lot of industries. Pretty much every industry you can think of we were covering we are covering and deloitte still to tell that of course and um we've been exposed to all the different uh projects you can think of from very large to very small from very legit to not legit at all um and so it was very interesting to be at the beginning of this industry really uh and to be exposed to the different um different things different projects and different people for sure and if i understand correctly you guys built a

pretty big team um at deloitte to go after this right yeah yeah the team the team originally was three people but again when i left it was 1200 people worldwide working on different things most of the team most of the focus of the team was to work on building solutions for our clients and for different groups, right? The traditional Deloitte clients are obviously the clients of those activities. But when you think about blockchain solutions, the clients were also new types of clients, clients who are looking to build consortium-based solutions,

business transaction solutions. And so there were also non-traditional clients, including some startups, which is kind of a new set of clients for Deloitte. And one of the startups was actually Citizens Reserve. And I was engaged with these clients. And after some time and some discussions, I decided to join them as a CEO. And that's how I ended up working on this amazing supply chain solution that we have here. Got it.

Well, so let's talk about enterprise blockchain in general first. Because I think there's probably a lot of people who are listening who would just completely dismiss the idea. They would just say, Hey, there's no use for enterprise blockchain. That's all just a bunch of hogwash. And I'm a believer in Bitcoin. I'm a believer in Ethereum. But the rest of the corporate applications don't make any sense. Obviously, you think differently and you've spent a bunch of time and now even fully jumped in an alternative belief that there is value to this enterprise blockchain. So maybe just talk a little bit about how you see enterprise blockchains fitting into the larger ecosystem,

and then we can dive deeper into just the supply chain in general. Yeah, and I think that's a very important thing to be convinced about, is that I think in the long run, we're going to see significant disruption in the business world because of blockchain technologies.

And I keep saying transaction platforms, the way we see them today, whether it's supply chain, whether it's capital market, whether it's any kind of platform that you use today to transact, right, the payments, those transactions are going to be either replaced or improved by a blockchain-based solution.

And then you go into some of the details if you want, but you have two big ways to do this from a blockchain point of view. You can say, okay, I'm going to use a blockchain solution, a blockchain technology to improve the way I do it today, and I'm going to keep kind of a centralized business model to do that, right? So I'm going to leverage your technology, but my business model remains a centralized business model.

And we see many examples of that where people are building new solutions, but those solutions are still a centralized-based solution, right? And you can claim they are decentralized database or something like that, but at the end of the day, they are not a completely new business model. Maybe new technology, but not a new business model.

And then on the other side of the spectrum, you have completely new business models who are going to change the way we think about business platforms. And that's where we fit, for example. But that's where you have a lot of different companies working on the next generation of business platform, whether it's banking, or insurance, or again, supply chain for us, or even intellectual property management, and so on. So you have very different ways to look at it. One is a centralized business model with decentralized technology and two is decentralized business model with decentralized technology. Does that make sense? For sure. And I guess, you know, with the

enterprises who are pursuing these strategies, how much of it do you think is driven by them actually trying to solve problems inside of their organizations or with customers and partners versus there's like a FOMO effect, right? Where they just feel like everyone else is working on blockchain and so of course i need to work on it and let's just start a blockchain team we'll figure it out as we go yeah i think i would i would categorize uh the market into three or the drivers into three things one is uh some people are getting pressure from their ceo or their board and then and they need they need to be able to talk blockchain all right so they do something because they have to but they they don't have a a real need the second one is the people who

are looking at blockchains from an efficiency point of view and try to get better um for example you know if i stick to supply chain in supply chain you have a third of the companies in the u.s have more than 10 different supply chain so it's very silo very inefficient and they are considering blockchain to improve that so it's an efficiency play not as much a change of business model and then the third category are the people who are really looking to change their existing business model or create new ones. And that's a different way to look at it. So the first one is more of a perception. The second one is more of a cost savings. The third one is more of a new revenue generation.

I see. And it's interesting because when we talk to different... And when I was talking to a lot of clients at Deloitte, and I still talk to a lot of them today because they are now becoming partners of the platform, you talk to three different profiles. And I call that the three cios um and so obviously everybody knows uh the chief information officer uh who's looking more at the cost efficiency play of the innovation who's looking at revenue generation new ways to do business and then you have the chief investment officer who's looking at blockchain and cryptocurrencies in particular as a way to invest so the three cios are typically the three clients, if you want, of that technology, but very different agenda, right? From cost

saving to new ways to introduce new products. And so let's talk about the supply chain specifically, right? Where, you know, most people continue to hear from a whole host of folks that this is a sector of commerce where there's a lot of challenges. There's a lot of inefficiencies, a lot of bureaucracies. Just everything is kind of needed to be fixed by technology. How do you view blockchain's role in solving some of those problems? So I think you have three big topics in supply chain, three big pain points. The first one is a lack of efficiency. And we talked about that a little bit. And you just mentioned

that, a lot of paper-based solutions, a lot of inefficiencies. But you can argue that most of those inefficiencies can be addressed by digitizing the process and making it better. You don't really need to have blockchain for that. So that's one driver, but that is not to me the main driver. The second one is very important, is traceability and visibility into your supply chain. And this one does require a blockchain because you do need the level of trust into a solution that no one actually controls. And here we have examples of that on a daily basis, unfortunately, between the meat we call or people committing to organic food or the fact that we don't know where this

lettuce contaminated by E. coli is coming from and we have to destroy the entire lettuce stock in the US. You have significant challenges in supply chain today from traceability and transparency and provenance. Right? So that's the second one. First one, efficiency. Second one is provenance.

The third one is something we don't talk enough in supply chain, but I think that's very important. It's a lack of access. And if you're a small and medium enterprise in the US or anywhere in the world, and you need access to sophisticated supply chain solutions, it's very expensive today. So it's not accessible. So what it means is people who need access to those capabilities, right, whether it's inventory management or forecasting or, you know, just enhanced sophisticated solutions, they have to rely on someone else. So they have to pay someone else or they have to go through a third party in order to get this information. And so it creates, of course, inefficiency, but it also creates the fact that people are not included into global commerce, right?

And one of the goals when you work on blockchain solution and supply chain is to address all three inefficiencies, transparency and improving the access to anybody, anyone who wants to participate in global commerce. And blockchain is critical because it provides that level of trust that you cannot deliver if you work on a centralized business model, centralized platform. So, let's talk about a specific use case, right? What would be one of the things in supply chain that, you know, maybe you feel most comfortable talking about and going through the nuances? Yeah, and I can pick one of the use cases we are working on today, which is the traceability of meat. And you have a lot of examples today from the ability to track the animal all the way to the meat that you consume is a very, very interesting challenge. not only from a food safety point of view but from an economical point of view

if you produce organic meat or grass-fed or kosher meat you have very unique constraints and limitations and regulations you have to follow and how do we make sure as consumers that those regulations have been followed all the way through

and blockchain can address that because you capture information along the way you store this information into a trusted platform everybody who needs to have access to this information will be able to have access to this information and you can go to a restaurant and you have a a mini a mini stick on the top of your of your stack with the qr code you can scan the qr code and access the entire supply chain verify that um all the different participants have been compliant with let's say organic

regulations and you can even see the on your phone the the the farmer who's raising those cows right So you can create a very unique transparency mechanics, which is good for business, but you can also create a very interesting consumer experience. I see. And the use case here, it seems like most of the work is being done under the promise that, one, let's say the meat was to spoil, you could actually find where that came from and contain the issue. Two is obviously the cost savings. What do you see the teams that are building this stuff like? What's that number one reason? Is it actually for those in which the public believes or are there other kind of drivers as to why people are doing this or want to use this technology? I think it's back to the three things that I mentioned earlier, which is one is the one

we talk about transparency and visibility. But two is efficiency. You have a lot of inefficiency And a good example of that is in trade finance. Trade finance to us is an extension of supply chain, if you want. And when you see that, so trade finance is not only the ability to finance activities, but also to finance suppliers. And I'll give you an example on another topic that we work on, which is the electronics market. And in the electronics market, some of the suppliers,

the first level of suppliers, the low end, if you want, the supplier tier four and tier five, right? They are struggling to get access to credit. And by opening a blockchain solution and give them the ability to engage with a blockchain solution, suddenly the financial institutions have access to the order placed by your large manufacturers and the fact that that order is going to trickle down to that supplier. So that supplier will get an order. And the bank now is more comfortable lending money to that supplier

because they see the entire track of the order from the top iPhone manufacturer, for example, Apple, right, all the way to the supplier. And so that's another way to look at it. Another way to look at the benefits of using blockchain and supply chain is to provide credit to the right and financial services to the right supplier. I see.

And what do you think are the biggest challenges right now for these enterprises? Is it things that are internal in terms of actually coordinating resources and getting kind of bureaucratic organizations to operate in a more iterative kind of cutting edge technology world? Or do you think that they're actually technological

and that some of the technology maybe isn't mature enough yet to actually be applied to these use cases? So I would say none of those. Oh, okay, interesting. Yeah, I'd say the number one challenge is the creation of a consortium. It's not a technology issue.

I don't think it is anymore. I think we have enough technology to be able to do what we need to do from a blockchain point of view. The challenge today is how do you convince people, organizations, suppliers, manufacturers, retailers, distributors,

to join a platform and start engaging with that platform? How do you create the incentive for that? It's not a new issue and it's not specific to supply chain. Very often, I say the first consortium in blockchain is also the last one, because the idea is to say, once you start engaging with a consortium and engaging with a network, and you have all your suppliers, all your distributors, there is no incentive to move out of that and create a new one. And that's where we are today. So you have a lot of entrenched parties who have no incentive to move to a new platform. And because they are big, it's very hard to convince them. So you have to

come up with a new incentive model to move those people into a new platform because now they get new benefits by joining that new platform. And we can talk about that later, but that's where I think the notion of a token is critical, is to create an incentive structure for people to participate in a new platform at the business level. Got it. And then, you know, when you were at Deloitte and even in your conversations now, as you work with more and more folks that are coming from these corporations and kind of businesses, what has been the general understanding, belief or thoughts on something like Bitcoin? Kind of, you know, the polar opposite of an enterprise blockchain where it's fully decentralized. It's kind of this digital currency that no one even knows who created it, etc. Yeah, so you have, I think you have two camps, right?

As you would expect, you have the people who are completely dismissing the idea, the innovation and the need. And then you have people looking at it as being curious and being, you know, wanting to understand what it means for them as an organization, for them as individuals are engaging with organizations. and how can they translate the technology into something useful for their own benefits. We have very, very different camps. And that's something you have to know. You have to realize when you engage with those organizations is who is in which camp

and you don't want to spend too much time trying to not get the benefit of technology. And you have to move away from the Bitcoin crypto, pure crypto discussion quickly. Unless you're talking to a retailer and someone who is looking to provide services and let their clients, customers pay with cryptocurrencies, which is a good thing too. But that's not typically the kind of discussion you're having into a large organization. The discussion is more focused on what are the benefits of using that technology, not as much about the crypto. I see. Okay. And then, you know, if you think more broadly about the blockchain technology in general, what's your take on, you know, what needs to happen for this to kind of reach mainstream? Right? I think there's a lot of kind of buckets right now or pools of people who are excited. But what's your take on, you know, what needs to occur?

Yeah, I think I would say three big things. I said the first one is regulatory clarity, which is not new. We have some challenges in particular in the US. We have challenges around clarity of what the regulator will do with that technology. And we see that almost every week, we see new things coming from the different regulators, including the SEC. So that's the number one challenge. And one of the things that we are, when we engage with companies ourselves, we look at convincing them to join the platform. And one of the feedback we are getting is, well, I don't know what the SEC is going to say about this, so wait, right? So that's very unfortunate because when you're a US company, you cannot

convince them until the regulators are open to that. But if you go outside of the U.S., the regulators, most of them are very, very open to the idea. So that's the first, I think, limitation and challenge is the regulatory thing. I think that technology is always a challenge, but it really depends on the use case. If you work in capital markets and you need millions of transactions per minute, that's probably not a good case for blockchain, unless you create your own version that's very tailored and I would argue

you end up in a centralized database again. So I think the technology is going to get there. The assumption that you can make on the technology side is the same assumption that Amazon made in the 90s. Amazon said,

I don't want to fix dial-up, I don't want to fix DNA, I don't want to fix encryption, I don't want to fix all the things that are not working right with the internet. I'm going to assume it's going to get better in the next few years

and I'm going to build something on the top of it and that's exactly the mindset that we have. We are saying we know we have some limitations today security, privacy, transparency scalability performance but we are not going to fix this ourselves. We're going to

engage with the community to fix it together. So that's why I'm very optimistic about the technology. I'm thinking it's going to get fixed and we won't have technology as a limitation anymore. And we start seeing that already. And I think the third one is more of a business limitation.

And we talked about that a little bit, but the creation of those networks, the creation of those consortium is probably the hardest thing to do because you have to convince people to join forces, engage with each other in a different way, and even share information that they were not sharing before.

And that's, to me, that's the biggest challenge. The first two are important, but I think they're going to be fixed. The third one is a much harder endeavor. For sure. Okay. And then what do you think is the most important company in crypto other than yourself? So I knew you would ask that question. um and so i think you know to me um so the way i think of companies in the blockchain world

is a little bit different than the traditional world right to me you create companies like like like we like we do you create company to initiate to to ignite a project but you know in 20 years our company might be dead and our platform will be alive right so i think um in that context I think the most important company in blockchain is probably the first company who's going to close because the platform is a success. That's the way I think about it in the long run, not next year, but in the long run. So let's see who's the first company to close doors because their platform is successful, not because they have to, but because they want to. For sure. If you could wave a magic wand, what's the one regulation that you would improve or change?

uh the one regulation or the one regulator um either i you know what i would what i would improve is i would improve the um not one regulation or one regulator i would actually uh find a way to reduce the number of regulators we have in the US around those topics. Because you have at least five different regulators working on this. And the issue is, it's going to take a long time for them to align. And it could create a lot of complexities and a lot of challenges for OSR startups to operate in the space. So I would wish for a consolidation of those regulators into a single regulator around this topic.

Got it. What's the most important book you've ever read? Oh, well, I'm not going to say The Truth Machine from Michael Casey, because I just finished. I like that book. Michael Casey is an advisor to the company, by the way, which is fantastic. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe the first, I don't know. I don't know. uh maybe the first book i read when i was a kid uh twenty thousand i don't know i don't know how to translate in english actually twenty thousand feet under the sea um i love that from from from jewelry and it's very innovative right that's innovation that's that's probably something that i'm very passionate about is the topic of innovation yeah okay um and then uh before

i finish up i usually ask one non-crypto question and let you ask me a question um if we uh we gotta admit that uh aliens exist are there alien pets or just aliens that are single species that are similar to humans so i'm i'm actually convinced that i can exist i don't think if i think it's when are we going to find them and connect why do you think that um because i think that statistically it's almost impossible to believe that there is only one planet in the entire universe with life as we as we know it uh you know we discover new planets almost every day and there is no way that at least one of them is going to be similar to what we have here and and has developed some kind of some form of life i don't know i don't know i don't know what kind

of life of course but that is statistically it makes sense to me that we're going to find something i don't know if we are going to have a chance to know that in our lifetime but i think so and and do the aspects i think i think yeah i would say you know you have paid forward for company so yeah i think they probably do aspect if they come over on this planet maybe they use earth aspects i don't know i love it um all right what one question do you have for me well i think you're asking questions that are not very crypto um there is a question i have I was asked one day when I was interviewing a long time ago after I was interviewing for a job, I asked you the question, uh,

if you have a third arm, where would it be? A third arm? Yeah. Um, and why? I just turned one of my, uh, legs into a third arm, I guess. I don't know. It feels like that's probably the farthest away from, uh, my other two arms. okay right it would make me more of a utility

ah yeah so you would turn into a utility token yeah what's the point of having a third arm if you can't use it yeah of course yeah yeah all right well sir listen this is fascinating i'm absolutely uh you know i'm really interested in how a lot of these corporations are thinking about using this technology and you're at the forefront of a lot of what they're doing. And I think your experience at both Deloitte

and now with the supply chain stuff is really compelling. So I appreciate the time and I'll have to do this again. Yeah, thank you for having me. And if your listeners have any questions, they can reach out.

We have a great platform and a website at suku.world. thank you for having me yeah thank you we'll talk soon hey everyone pop here if you like this episode

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