EY extends the blockchain-fueled infrastructure for ecosystems

EY is investing further in industrializing its blockchain solutions, backing its long-term bet that blockchains will do for business ecosystems what ERP did for the enterprise—gathering, connecting, and delivering data across ecosystems.

EY sees an opportunity to access new sources of value by applying blockchain to go beyond the walls of the enterprise, connecting data, and processes across entire ecosystems, reflecting the ambitions of HFS OneEcosystem™ (see Exhibit 1).

Exhibit 1: OneEcosystem fosters collaboration via a distributed infrastructure like blockchain can deliver

Source: HFS Research, 2023

A new era of transformation—linking processes across enterprises

EY is committed to moving enterprise customers to this new era of enterprise transformation, linking processes across enterprises. The focus is on tokenizing every asset, product, and service, automating every B2B process, and understanding operations with analytics.

At its Global Blockchain Summit on May 9, EY shared that it will transition to an API-first and privacy-by-default approach this year. That approach focuses on delivering general purpose tokenization through its tokenization service; management of carbon emissions, offsets, and product-level carbon emission measurement via its new OpsChain ESG; and contract set-up and management, purchase order management, and partner management through its Contract Management Starlight Zapp blockchain application.

EY’s Starfall responds to privacy concerns on the public blockchain

This transition is enabled by EY’s open-source contributions, Nightfall and Starlight. Nightfall enables confidential transfers of tokens between companies, while Starlight allows enterprises to implement unique business logic on the blockchain; the source code for both is available publicly. In addition, EY announced Starfall, which ties both open-source contributions together. It aligns smart contracts with transactions in Nightfall, enabling a single privacy environment while allowing unique business rules for each relationship. Interestingly, Starfall is proprietary to EY; it’s EY’s secret sauce.

Blockchain-enforced contracts back hard-negotiated outcomes

The combination of open source and secret sauce described above might be a little technical for non-enthusiasts; thankfully, EY developed offerings showing how it applies to business use cases. For example, EY’s Contract Manager allows enterprises to automate the enforcement of key terms and conditions in contracts, with privacy, on the Ethereum public blockchain. EY believes Contract Manager can close the gap between a contract’s defined and negotiated details and the reality of their delivery. For example, customers may have negotiated exacting formulas for discounts and chargebacks, but they lose value if the deal’s details are swiftly forgotten or applied inappropriately.

EY’s OpsChain Contract Manager proved its value case in a five-year deployment at Microsoft (albeit on a private network). When applied to digital software procurement for the Xbox video game network, blockchain cut the time required to calculate rights and royalties owed by 99%, administration costs fell by 40%, and the full transparency built into blockchain contracts meant less time held up by litigation.

Exhibit 2: Transitions are underway, but much of what EY has planned remains in development or test mode

Source: EY and HFS Research, 2023

Blockchain combats fake news during the pandemic

At EY’s event, Stefano De Allesandri, CEO of the Italian news agency ANSA, explained how EY helped protect ANSA’s reputation for reliability even during an explosion of fake news during the pandemic. It worked with EY to develop ANSAcheck on EY OpsChain Traceability. When ANSA publishes a story, the solution stores a unique ID and publication details in an immutable block. When republished by a third party, if all the information matches that on the blockchain, it will receive an “ANSAcheck” marker. Readers can view the history of the publication to verify its authenticity.

Find a partner with OneEcosystem ambitions to help you through the next generation of blockchain-driven transformation.

Just when you thought your transformation efforts might be done, here comes the next generation with blockchain and OneEcosystem at its core. How quickly should you respond? Even blockchain champions expect this to be a long journey we should plan for in decades rather than years. A good portion of EY’s proposition is either in development or testing, but it also delivers value for clients like ANSA today.

Enterprises should find a partner with OneEcosystem ambitions to support their blockchain exploration journey or risk being left on a digital island while their peers collaborate through blockchain-fueled ecosystems.