What are the advantages to using Blockchain technology in the financial services space?

Two things:

1. 24/7 trading. You can buy shoes at 3 a.m. but you can't buy Exxon stock. The reason that you can't is because right now when you buy Exxon stock from a broker, you aren't really buying Exxon stock. When you buy Exxon stock, the broker issues you an IOU, and then in a few days, the brokers transfer stocks with each other. The trouble with this system is that it means that you have to close down the stock market each day, and you have to keep it shut because, when the brokers compare notes, they often find something off, and people spend hours dealing with it.

2. Where's my money? True story. I ask for a bank transfer in HK. I actually type in the number for an invalid account. Because it is between two banks, I have to make three or four bank visits, and ask them where's my money. They have to look through their records, and it turns out that each bank says that the other banks has my money. The fact that the two banks literally have their headquarters right next to each other, means that I only had to spend two weeks to figure out what is going on. Now if one of the banks was outside of HK, I'd been totally stuffed.

Now with blockchain, all of the transfers go into a distributed database. With my key, I should be able to see all of the transfers I made, and if one goes wrong, I know where my money is.

This stuff can be costly. Once you reduce the cost of settlement so that you can send small payments cross-border, then a lot of opportunities open up. I'm trying to do USD 1000 shipments of coffee. The reason that you don't have special branded coffee is purely a payments issue.