Dr. Lee Braine is the managing director of research and engineering in Barclays' Chief Technology Office.
Insider sat down for a virtual chat with Braine — who was named one of Business Insider's 100 Transformers — to discuss what he's working on and where the industry is going next. You're not an average banker. You're a computer scientist by training. Can you tell me a bit more about your background?: I have a PhD from University College London in computer science—the particular topic was object-oriented functional programming.
So to make that abstract idea a bit more concrete: imagine if you've got a clearing house, and currently we send all our trades to the clearing house, it performs the processing and sends us back the result. Imagine if, instead, each of the participants formed a network, they operated peer-to-peer, and that peer-to-peer model then gets translated down into the technical solution. So that's a different way of working—you can call that a distributed financial market infrastructure.
You then start getting the opportunity to transform the industry, and all the participants. And those opportunities don't come up very often. So I think we're living in interesting times where this technology is just reaching the right degree of maturity, and there's also appetite from the market participants to reduce costs.: There are many, many business processes that could benefit from the rigor and standardization that smart contracts would bring.
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