newslogical.com
A formal Deloitte employee and a prominent Bitcoin researcher, Pierre Rochard, has said Deloitte should have bought Bitcoin as early as 2013, but the top four auditing firms decided not to.
The Bitcoin investor and co-founder of Nakamoto Institute who made the revelation on Twitter said he was reported to the Human Resource Department of Deloitte by a coworker for speaking in a Bitcoin conference in 2013.
During this period, the Human Resource Department heard about Bitcoin, and had the opportunity of becoming an early investor, but instead did not do anything about it.
Rochard worked at Deloitte as a securitization consultant between 2013 and 2014, but this incidence possibly happened when he started his career at the auditing firm.
Rather than the co-worker reporting him and the HR turning deaf ears to the digital currency, the two should have bought Bitcoin instead, the former Deloitte and BitPay employee suggested.
Rochard said rather than the company listen to what Bitcoin was at the time, they were busy thinking.
However, he did not regret working at the firm, but he said he was reported because the person felt speaking at the conference would look like he was speaking on behalf of the company.
The statement from Rochard shows that Deloitte and its employees missed the highly profitable early investment in Bitcoin.
It is not clear if Deloitte invested in a cryptocurrency as of yet, however, the professional service firm has invested in SETL. While Deloitte did not reveal how much it invested in the blockchain startup, SETL is one of the major startups applying blockchain to payment settlement across the globe.
SETL said it got the investment from Deloitte after the two firms had collaborated for a year.
As well Deloitte has collaborated with different firms in the blockchain space lately.
Deloitte offers financial advisory, tax services, consulting to big firms across the globe. The financial company says it “serves four out of five Fortune Global 500® companies” with his over 245,000 professionals in over 150 countries.
Meanwhile, last year, Luxembourg Times publicized that Delloite tested Bitcoin among its employees in late 2019. The action, according to the report, was to see how the auditing giant could use cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
However, the company said there is no plan to allow clients to pay in Bitcoin. Other top auditing firms like PwC are already accepting Bitcoin from clients since 2019. VeChain, a world-class blockchain firm, is a partner of Deloitte.
PwC and VeChain collaborated to help Walmart China invent a traceability solution to reduce the increasing rate of counterfeit products in China.
Also, Cardano, another crypto project, is a partner of PwC. Big firms across the world are investing in blockchain and crypto companies.
Beyond Deloitte, fintech and some other global reputable tech firms like Google are making use of Blockchain technology. In fact, Google had invested in top blockchain startups like Ripple Labs Inc, which has over 250 financial firms as it collaborated through its RippleNet remittance innovation widely used across the globe.