Deloitte, a professional services firm, is helping to build a prototype payment system based on blockchain to be used in the healthcare sector.

This and other potential uses of the blockchain technology for businesses are explored by Deloitte’s software service Rubix, as the project’s business development manager and co-founder Iliana Oris Valiente revealed in an interview to CoinDesk.

“Mostly clients will drive their agenda based on their industry and based on their goals and needs. We match that with our understanding of the technology and how we think it could impact their business, not necessarily their legacy business today but what their business could look like in the next two-to-three years,” she says.

In addition to healthcare, other possible areas that could be enhanced by the use of blockchain and are being studied by Deloitte are the supply chain sector and loyalty space. Among the advantages of blockchain technology Valiente emphasised “the automation of certain processes … by providing the transparency and the open ledger, if you can drive efficiencies in existing processes that's a very clear value proposition of the technology.”

Rubix, launched in summer 2015, is mostly working on the basis of Ethereum protocol, however the firm claims to provide access to multiple distributed consensus platforms and, thus, is ready to build a client’s case on bitcoin blockchain.

Deloitte has previously expressed its opinion on the potential of bitcoin and blockchain: in October 2015 the company published the paper Bitcoin At The Crossroads, arguing that governments should provide a supportive environment for the cryptocurrency.

Anna Lavinskaya