Moving Towards A Decentralised Payment System Phillip Toth (@philliptoth1) Big Data and Artificial Intelligence technologies made a profound changes to financial services. The next generation of financial technology powered by Blockchain will be an even bigger. Fintech entrepreneurs and financial services companies alike are already shaping that future. Expect mobile payments like WeChat where its 600 million monthly users can send payments without use of bank account not only to expand but improve. The likely successor to centralised processing of payments is a private crypto key with one’s personal information. Not only will this replace one’s public identity on the Internet it will act as a digital signature for financial transactions. This represents a gigantic shift away from centralised payment processing to individualised decentralised transactions. Information sharing works by a, “challenge-response interaction” where the challenger takes a public key and encrypts a message. A responder proves identity by decrypting, amending, and returning the message encrypted with their own private key. That is what is known as a digital signature. If challenged, the owner of a private key can always prove ownership of the identity and the contents of a public ledger. The new decentralised world eliminates the need for independent third-parties such as trustees, processors, clearing houses, exchanges and settlement organisations who function to verify and validate information. Essentially, the need for centralised data backed-up with local data will no longer be required. Reduced staffing is one of the main reasons financial firms cite for embracing Blockchain. It is more efficient for the individual consumer as well. In a decentralised system, there is no need for the multitude of passwords the centralised system requires. That comes as a huge relief to people who find it difficult remembering up to a dozen or more username password combinations. The new system also does away with individual credit cards as all consumer and financial information decentralise to an individual device such as a smart phone.