By 2020 retail will embrace blockchain: Sanjay Mehta

Blockchain technology is helping industries across the globe to secure data and bring in transparency in multiple processes. The technology can widely help retailers in creating unifying force in the industry. For example, in loyalty program point of view, this technology can make the redemption process easy and transparent for the customer. It is just a matter of time that the industry would see a decentralized way of loyalty points getting generated.In a conversation with Indianretailer.com, Sanjay Mehta, a well-known angel investor, shares insights on the aforementioned technology and how the retail industry can benefit from it.

How blockchain can benefit payment side in retail?

In retail there is huge amount of scope to ensure secured payment side,because the consumers will have ease in managing payments with retailers. On the lending side, a lot of suppliers will use blockchain on P2P model and the biggest value which I see across is creating online commerce, which is not controlled by single entity for a single point of failure, is going to be the biggest delivery that blockchain can offer for centralized e-commerce application.

From loyalty program perspective, how blockchain can help in de-centralize manner?

If a retailer creates decentralized loyalty program across different branches with the help of blockchain, and start engaging and getting their loyalty points into one blockchain based application, then it will bring a unifying force into the complete retail industry.This will offer huge benefits for consumers because they don’t need to keep so many cards as there is transparency with the payment system and redemption becomes easy.It is just a matter of time that we will see decentralized way of loyalty points getting generated.

How sound proof bockchain based solution is for data protection?

Blockchain database cannot be hacked, because it has got military grade cryptographic. In that sense it’s a world’s one of the most secured technologywhich decentralizes the data and crates transparency in the system. In this, one can only add data and not modify any record on blockchain. Once the data is entered it will be a permanent history. I have been looking at one of the startups which is into managing records for ultra-luxury brands. Today we have got a big problem of fake goods in retail and in this case blockchain provides huge use case for ultra-luxury goods.

How do you see the retail industry upgrading towards this technology?

I believe retail has got many problems right now it is still thinking whether to go online or offline. There are many battlefields so I think we are waiting for blockchain as a technology to get mature. I am sure every retailer is exploring so by 2020 we will see the retail industry will embrace blockchain.

How EOP app can be beneficial for retailers?

Blockchain technology is evolving now with the launch of new bockchain app EOS with which we can do 100,000 transactions per second. This kind of platform availability will bring a lot of retailers and other payment providers to start creating enterprise grade secure payment systems.