Blockchain as a Service (Baas): Financial and Non-Financial Use Cases

Blockchain, as the decentralized database technology, has already taken the business world by storm. Blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) business model helped businesses avail the blockchain technology opportunities without maintaining big server deployments for blockchain. Here we are going to define the Blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) business model and some of the most well-known financial as well as non-financial use cases of blockchain.

What is Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS)?

Blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) is the business model of managing the blockchain platform to help businesses develop blockchain-based applications and digital solutions. While they can build their custom solutions on a distributed network, the BaaS vendor provides infrastructure and tools for blockchain development.

Some of the key features of the Blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) business model include the following.

• Managing platform architecture.
• Providing modular, prebuilt infrastructure and network components.
• Allowing smooth and easy to implement workflow.
• Extensive range of middleware tools for project monitoring and development.
• Project-specific dashboard for tracking and monitoring development.
• Allowing auditing of transaction records.
• Inbuilt connections for services.
• Professional consultations for business-specific implementation.

Now, let us look at some of the most credible use cases of blockchain from both the financial and non-financial industries.

Trade Finance

Blockchain has the potential to revolutionize the entire international trade and commerce activities by removing the reliance on paperwork, invoices, letters of credit, bills, etc. Thanks to blockchain's decentralized database system, the time-consuming processes, manual paperwork, and bureaucratic difficulties can be completely avoided.

Fast-paced Payments

A decentralized transaction mode like cryptocurrency banking and all financial institutions can facilitate faster payments and lower the processing cost to a minimum. Top-notch security powered by blockchain's completely tamper-proof database offers another awesome advantage.

Robust Identity Verification and Authentication

Banks and financial institutions rely heavily on identity verification and authentication for every transaction. Since the verification and authentication process goes through several time-consuming steps that customers are reluctant to pass through, the decentralized Blockchain-based database access can help ease the verification process.

Better Auditing

Since there are strict regulatory requirements in accounting corresponding to data validity, it is often slow to adopt changes and new technologies. Blockchain can transform modern accounting because of the decentralized and secure compliance management, keeping multiple parties in sync. This also helps smooth auditing whenever the business requires.

Supply Chain Management

When it comes to supply chain management, businesses need to keep records and maintain those records with frequent updates about the latest changes. Blockchain-based decentralized inventory and supply chain data management proves to be the ideal solution because all the transaction records will be maintained through an immutable ledger. Moreover, the Blockchain database cannot be deleted, tampered or changed and provides optimum data security.

Healthcare

In the healthcare sector, keeping a record of all the diseases and clinical procedures is extremely important for treatment success and providing relevant medical research insights. Since while seeking consultations from a doctor, we generally provide the latest details and not the detailed medical history, the patient profile remains incomplete, affecting the accuracy of the treatment.

Blockchain by keeping medical records corresponding to patients' treatments and all previous ailment information help doctors understand the patient's condition and the nature of disease more accurately.

Managing Digital Identity

All governments and their tributaries of services and agencies worldwide need to preserve and manage a record of the citizen's identity. Such a database will have passport data, social security numbers, PAN Card data etc. since managing such a record of various IDs is complex and complicated as a process, the decentralized database management with blockchain can provide a great solution. This will help government and security agencies and citizens access this pool of information whenever they need them and wherever they need them.

Tamper-Proof Election Process

Voting or electoral process is often subjected to eta tampering efforts, and this is another area where blockchain technology can really play a great role. Electoral data is mainly tampered with because of the ample scope of changing the registered voting data that stays out of any auditing mechanism's reach. In case blockchain is used for managing the voting data, a truly safer mechanism for preventing tampering and changing of eta can be managed easily. As blockchain technology allows using smart contracts, the data will stand as immutable, and a voting decision cannot be changed once it is registered.

Real Estate

Real estate businesses generally need to maintain and manage an astonishing volume of documents, including personal information, lease data, rent, terms, and different property conditions. Blockchain technology can appear to be an ideal solution by managing the entire pool of data in a decentralized and secure manner that can be accessed from multiple user points. Thanks to this, a lot of processing time can be saved while reducing the cost of such backend tasks.

Conclusion

Blockchain technology will continue to prosper, and its popularity is likely to break all barriers across business niches. This is why Blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) business model has appeared with such loud buzz making the technology more affordable and accessible to small businesses and startups.

About the Author:

Juned Ghanchi is a co-founder and CMO at the app development company IndianAppDevelopers. He is also a technology blogger who writes about software and IT technologies news at various blogs and magazines.

Photo by Terry on Unsplash