By FINTECH Books Contributor, Brennan Wright Blockchain ‘Distributed Ledger Technology’, aka Blockchain technology, will prove to be an unstoppable force in many spheres in the future – RegTech is definitely one of them. Blockchain and other distributed ledgers will eventually allow for the development of more efficient trading platforms, payments systems, and information sharing systems in and between financial institutions. When paired with multi-factor digital identity verification, this will enable timely, cost efficient and reliable KYC checks. More secure, more transparent, seamless identity authentication and management with less reliance on traditional identity data means we’ll be seeing a lot more Blockchain-based tech in the Identity arena. Our social media accounts offer valuable forms of attestation and rich identity data. Integrating social media checks and scoring to build valuable layers of identity information will become a standard practice – especially when other forms of identity and financial data are scarce. Using social media for onboarding will become an essential element for multi-factor identity verification. When machines start interacting (and transacting) with each other, which they already are doing, we’ll need to get a firm handle on where, when, what and how much for each and every action. Tracking the identity of each machine and the corresponding business/human owner will be something that keeps the industry on its toes in years to come. Too often we refer to Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) as being one and the same. To borrow from John Kennedy ML is remembering and AI is thinking, remembering, deciding and acting. Both ML  AI will play an ever more important part in the identity game in the future. Look out for these technologies in the onboarding, anti-hacking and compliance spaces especially. If you would like to learn more about FinTech please look at our video courses at FINTECHCircleInstitute.com