Full disclosure; I am firmly in the camp that believes that crypto currency will ultimately reach its aspirational goals of main street adoption, but I am categorically under no illusion that this will happen either fast or soon. It is clear that there is a wide gamut of “traditional world” businesses across Banking, Legal, Accounting, Financial Services, Taxation, Gaming and Gambling that could be shaken to their core, so in the interest of invoking a discussion, and attempting to understand the crypto currency world we endeavour to live in, let’s use the accounting & ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) industry as an isolated example, for no reason other than this domain stands in line to be disrupted as much as any other.
The Accounting & ERP (vendors) landscape is an incredibly competitive landscape populated by multiple big and small vendors distributed globally, all of which cater to all sizes of organizations. So, how does crypto currency gain adoption amongst these vendors who influence millions of the world’s businesses through the software they produce and the associated advice their channel of integration partners offer? Well, at first glance it seems straightforward because crypto currency is just another currency; just like the Dollar, Euro and Yen. Almost all of these vendors have multicurrency functionality as standard. So it’s that simple then, vendors just communicate to their market that they already handle multi-currency as existing functionality, so everyone just go right ahead and transact in the crypto currency of your choice.
But hang on, not every crypto currency is made equal – certainly not in the hands of regulatory agencies globally anyway. Depending on the region of the world a vendor operates in, crypto currency has been treated dramatically – and with mass adoption aspirations in mind – damagingly, inconsistently, ranging from a traditional currency to an informal form of barter. The reactions of separate jurisdictions have ranged from enacting very strong pro-crypto regulations including strong privacy, to an attempt at an outright ban by certain states.
Regardless, for vendors to ponder adoption of crypto currency for their install base, this represents a potentially harmful legislative minefield that poses a non-trivial challenge to adoption. Let’s steamroll that issue for the sake of this article and imagine for a moment we all live in a global crypto currency utopia; a place where all regulatory authorities give the green light to crypto currency on their turf.
Sounds great, but wait, there is already a wide range of digital currencies to choose from – and a whole range of new “derivatives” under construction in the crypto currency development community. So does each vendor need to accommodate all these currencies, or should they choose to support just a few? Does that mean, for example, that vendors need to consider an integration with one crypto currency exchange or will it need to support a few, or none? If there needs to be a collaboration with more than one, how does a vendor choose the most reliable and reputable exchange to integrate with? Where do the big guys that have operated in the money exchange space traditionally stand on their own crypto currency play? Should vendors wait and let this play out, choose not to integrate at all, or choose to build or buy something of their own?
In pursuit of user adoption, let’s keep moving forward regardless, and let’s imagine even further that the vendors have made their decisions about a currency, or currencies, to support and an associated crypto currency exchange to work with. So does it then elect to build its own wallet, integrate with an existing wallet, or many wallets? There are still more questions, and again certainly no trivial issues.
Vendors clearly have some planning ahead in the crypto currency space and early adopters have already started planning. Portland based, VersAccounts ERP, offers online ERP solutions designed for medium sized businesses with a global footprint, and CEO Sunil Pande has taken a long term view as an early adopter in saying, “We are 100% sure that crypto currencies will become an important vehicle for commerce in the near future and we are actively engaged in developing our plans around how to best support it for our customers as well as for ourselves and our channel partners”.
Pande’s reference to his partner channel is very representative of the Accounting & ERP industry in general insofar as it is built on an interdependent triumvirate of vendors, partners and consumers, which, when working in harmony form the B2B (business-to-business) backbone of the industry’s ecosystem. The partner typically will advise their customers which software to adopt and will offer professional services associated with the application they elect to support. Right now – and with apologies to the early adopters (and as a sweeping generalization – this underlying triumvirate reflects no more than a collective conglomerate of ignorance when it comes to crypto currency. It represents a concurrently massive educational challenge for the crypto currency industry to address if it is to achieve mass adoption in this lucrative B2B space.
The ranks of the early adopters are swelling in the partner community as well. Rusty Tarsches, a CPA who owns and runs Targo Advisors in Atlanta Georgia, supports XERO Accounting & VersAccounts ERP to offer cloud based accounting services for start-ups, emerging growth and mature business organizations. Rusty believes, “crypto currency has a huge potential for disruption in many industries and at Targo we make decisions about which vendors we support based on their progressive thinking, and we are very interested in how vendors will integrate crypto currency into their architecture. We are learning as the crypto industry emerges so we can give our customers the most informed professional advice possible”.
It seems certain that crypto currency is a tsunami in an ocean of small waves. It will have enormous implications. As vendors, and as partners providing mission critical services for these vendors, now is the time to become appropriately familiar with this space. Customer needs and opportunities are on the way.
For crypto currency adoption to happen in the Accounting & ERP space, a market greater than 3 million businesses worldwide, it’s the vendors that will need to ask and answer these questions for themselves before any users start to adopt new crypto currencies, and in my opinion it’s at the wallet level that you get to the user experience interaction, where “the rubber meets the road”. Main Street users will get to make their owndecisions about accepting a crypto currency alongside, or in substitute of, the Dollar, Euro, and the Yen.
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