Possibilities of Blockchain for CRM | Salesforce

What if you could create a new business model for collaborating more efficiently with all your partners? Today, companies have walls around every source of data, so it's costly and complex to share information. But with Salesforce Blockchain, you can create a secure network for quickly and reliably sharing data. A blockchain is a new kind of database. It's secure and tamper proof, and instead of being centrally managed, it's distributed among multiple parties. Each party has their own copy of database and the data is traceable for easy auditing. When everyone has visibility into the same data, it builds trust in the network. And this helps companies come together to deliver better customer experiences. Like a high end clothing company with a complex supply chain, their customers want assurances about ethical sourcing and product authenticity. And with Salesforce Blockchain, the company can create a trust network for their entire supply chain. Adding every cotton grower and fabric factory. The blockchain gives them visibility into each step along the way, so it's quicker and easier to trace a product back to its source, confirm ethical labor practices, and elevate customer trust. A university can use Salesforce Blockchain to create a lifelong learner profile for each student that's shared across a network of schools. As a student progresses, her transcripts and degrees are published to the network in real time, making it simple to transfer colleges. And after graduating, she can easily show her learner profile to a potential employer, confirming her entire education history. Building a blockchain usually requires lots of code, but with Salesforce Blockchain, you can do it with clicks. Just start by defining the rules for your trust network, then pick the data you want to share, invite your partners, setting permissions for who can see and do what on the network, and they can all connect using Salesforce or any app of their choice. You can even set it up to send notifications, automate actions and trigger workflows, helping you break boundaries to collaborate in new ways and keep your customers at the center of your business. Visit Trailhead to get started and see how to create your network of trust with Salesforce Blockchain. Blaze your trail with Salesforce.

All right. Hi, everybody. That was a good video, wasn't it? Yeah, I'm sure you liked it. So how many of you went to the keynote today? Right. Great. What a great intro to Salesforce Blockchain. That's finally here, right? So, for the past, my name is Aydin Suleimanova and I am part of the platform team here at Salesforce. And for the past few months, I've had The privilege of working with some of the brightest minds, our product leaders and engineers, to really prepare and bring this product market. But what I've enjoyed the most is working with our customers that have been along with us along the journey and from the very beginning, building the product and building their vision and their solutions on top of Salesforce Blockchain. And one of those customers is here today with us. And you're going to hear from them right here on this stage. SMP Global Ratings. They're going to show you their demo and what they have built on Salesforce Blockchain and what their vision is for transforming their entire industry. All right, so first, forward looking statements. We're a publicly traded company. Please make all your purchasing decisions based on what's currently available. And you know, one thing I've learned while working with the blockchain team and bringing this product to market is that there's never enough of explaining what blockchain is. So we're going to go ahead and look at the overview of what blockchain is and look at it from a different perspective. There is no better way to start talking about blockchain than by just looking at how connected we are today and how connected we will be going forward. There will be 10 Internet connected devices for every human being on Earth by 2025. That's 10 machines per one human. And what it means to you as businesses and technologies is that to be part of it all and to take advantage of this connectivity, you have to really go beyond the four walls of your business and build connections with partners that will also have that data that will be generated as part of this. Right. Because you won't be the only one who has data about your customers. There will be partners, distributors, suppliers, but also your industry peers, regulators, companies in other industries that touch your customer. And you as technologies will need to really step back and look at your architectures that are probably mostly transaction based today and think about ways of making them more relationship space. So you're open and you can be part of a much bigger ecosystem. But it's not happening today. It's hard because if you look around at your industry peers, regulators, channel partners, distributors, all of them kind of live within their own universe of data, right, that they centrally manage, whether it's on premises or in the cloud. And that truly impacts the customer. Think about use cases or cases where you yourself are dealing with a service where multiple parties are involved. I recently had an accident. I'm fine now, but I had to deal with an insurance claim and there was Insurance, claims adjuster, insurance companies, repair shops, and I had to have a lot of back and forth to actually get the claim resolved. What if they had a single view of, of what was happening to the entire history of my case? It would have been much easier. But there is another issue beyond just connecting. And the reason, because the partners are not so easily coming together to share data at this scale so constantly and openly, is because there are questions like, okay, you saw the use case of asu, potentially hundreds of colleges coming together, or you can think of banks, dozens of banks can come together to create a payment service, for example. But for that to happen, questions like this should be answered. Who should own the data? Who should centrally manage it? Can the data be trusted? And there were no clear answers to these questions until now. Distributed technologies and blockchain make it easy to connect and share data across multiple parties. And you may also ask, there may be some case where an integration or traditional solution can help. Yes, but to really do it at this scale and with trust and transparency and traceability built in, we really have to think of a different paradigm where very soon, as this technology evolves, we will see that there is a rise of trusted business networks where groups of companies and individuals are going to come together to solve a business problem around the customer experience, or improve an efficiency of a process, or create completely new business models. So what is blockchain and how does it do it? At a very basic level, it is a new kind of a database that saves and traces data in a way that is distributed, verified and secure. First, one of the key properties of blockchain is that it's distributed among a network of computers or partners. And that does two things. First, there is no single point of failure. And second, instead of having to trust one single partner or one single party, the trust is distributed among all the partners. Everyone is equal, everyone can administer and has a voice. That's very important. Second, it's verified every time a change is saved to the database. An entire network, depending on what consensus algorithm you pick, verifies it in one way or another, verifies that the data is coming in the right format from the right place, and that adds additional level of trust to data. And last, and this is the secret sauce of blockchain, it is secure and transparent. The way the data is saved, the blocks are hashed together. It is very easy to go back and trace any change that is made to the data. So it is really tamper evident. You can't hide if you change something in your blockchain and these three properties really create an opportunity for trusted and transparent sharing of data and an opportunity for trusted business networks and ecosystems to create completely new business models and transform industries. What about Salesforce Blockchain? What do we bring into the market? So to do that, I'd like to invite the fearless leader behind it all, our Senior Vice President of Emerging technologies, Adam.

Thank you. Thanks so much, Akin. It's awesome to be here today talking blockchain. It's our job to to bring tremendous innovation to the marketplace and build products, but it's also our job to question if we should. And some of the discussion around blockchain has been around, is it a solution? Looking for a problem? There's been a lot of hype. So what we've done is we've spoken to over 100 customers over the past year understanding what pain points they have around the existing blockchain platforms. We've understood their visions. And what we found out is the same way that Salesforce has democratized these other technologies, we can do the same for blockchain. So when we say democratize, what we mean by this is basically make it consumable by any company. So you could be a small company without an IT organization. You need it to be easy and fast. You could be a large organization with 100 person IT team. But do you want those IT resources, do you want them focused on infrastructure, on security, on scalability, on keeping the lights on? Or do you want them connected to the business and working on those real huge, thorny problems, problems to solve? So what we found is whether it was cloud or apps or social mobile, most recently with Einstein, adoption of AI by our customers is unbelievable, is we've enabled companies both large and small to leverage these technology. And we found the same thing with blockchain. And we talked to our customers. There's a huge opportunity for us to bring blockchain to market with them, allow them to innovate and really build those amazing new business models that Egun was talking about. It's hard. So Parker talked about this earlier. This is something we've heard from our customers again and again. There's technology challenges, creating a shared data model. There's agreeing on rules and permissions. So blockchain is about networks, about putting companies together. So you need to agree with these companies. What's the governance model? What are the rules? Who has permission to do what? These are questions that companies aren't typically, you know, they're not focused on, they're focused on themselves. They're not focused on the partners so how do you do that? Creating an engagement layer, a user experience. Sometimes we even use the word humanize. We want to humanize blockchain, not just the UI and make it easy and consumable, but the way we talk about it, the verbiage we use, how do we not use complicated blockchain tech terminology that the business people and even some people in it will have their own struggles with? And then, of course, on and on. And Parker mentioned this earlier too. 55% say a skills gap is the biggest obstacle to adoption of blockchain technologies. So introducing Salesforce Blockchain, you heard about this before. The fast and easy way to create trusted partner networks. This is about, in some ways solving that skills gap and making it easy. Clicks, not code. You said on the upper left. But it's also about that extension of CRM. It's breathing life into your blockchain data. You have data that's decentralized, shared between your partners. How do we take that data and make it actionable and hook it to the rest of our lightning platform, to sales, cloud and service cloud and run analytics across centralized and decentralized data. And then partner adoption, which we'll talk more about in a second. So let's go one layer deeper. Let's get a little bit into the technology stack. So we built this on Hyperledger Sawtooth. It's an open source blockchain protocol by the Hyperledger foundation. And we built a ton of custom code on top of it and really integrated it with our platform and with our metadata. And the metadata piece is really important. What this means is you have a flexible data model which is not offered typically in blockchain technologies today. So creating custom objects, creating custom fields, all the things that Salesforce administrators do and love today. The flexibility in that data model to map Salesforce to your business process. What we heard from our customers is with other blockchain platforms, you have to change your business to map to their data model. Here, it's all about you. It's about your process. Easy and flexible consensus is the verification. We talked about earlier. Smart contracts. I want to highlight because we've done something really interesting which is enable them to be built in a declarative fashion. This is a big deal because this is a real challenge in the industry today. So with clicks, not code, we can build smart contracts and again, hooked right into our platform and leveraged by all the partners in the network. Blockchain builder. So blockchain builder is for the admins. The admins love this. They can Go in, they can create new partners, they can create all the rules, tie it to the workflow, tie it to their processes. Everything you expect an admin to do. And it looks just like Salesforce. They don't have to learn anything new. Of course, they need to learn a little bit about our new technologies and whatnot. But the actual way they interact with the blockchain doesn't change from the way they interact with standard Salesforce. And this is the big one, Blockchain Connect. So this is the connection to our platform and this is really weird from our customers is the huge value. So, yeah, make it easy, that's fantastic. And a huge differentiator, but then make it powerful. So here's where you see, we've lit up everything here from a lightning platform standpoint, connected to service, service cloud cases can now be triggered by events that happen on the blockchain by any partner in the network marketing journeys. If it's a B2C example, you can bring consumers on a journey and it's all connected back into core Salesforce apps communities. You know, we talked before about running analytics across centralized and decentralized data. The last piece here is around partner adoption. So this is really critical when you talk about that skills gap inhibiting, sort of go lives of blockchain plays. Another big thing that's inhibited go live is partner adoption. So this is all about that. So we enable partners to interact with the blockchain. They can be a Salesforce customer. Fantastic. And of course, we love customers, but they don't have to be. They can log into the blockchain through APIs. They can log in through their own infrastructure, AWS, GCP. And we enable a blockchain explorer. The blockchain explorer is really interesting. They can not only log in through whatever infrastructure they choose, but we provide them a really nice UI in which to do so. We're really trying to make this easy and seamless and drive adoption and close that skills gap and enable companies to get out of this land of POCs and testing and experiments and to go live. Huge business value, huge roi. So with that, let me pause and let's see it for real. So let me introduce Prithvi, who's our master architect and mastermind behind Blockchain, and Ryan, who's an amazing member of our marketing organization, part of Akin's team, to bring us through a live demo. So thank you very much. I do I keep this, actually.

Thanks, Adam. Am I on? Am I on? Can you hear me? Yeah. And thank you so much to Kara And Helder back there for helping us to run the demo. So before we kick off this demo, I want to set the stage a little bit for everybody here. Most of us have purchased tickets through a third party reseller of some sort. Me, I'm an avid concert goer, so I've done this many times. There is also an unfortunate few of us who have noticed that those tickets aren't always valid. Is there anyone else that had that experience where you get turned away at the door? One over here. The worst and so awkward. So what we're showing today is a way to verify authenticity of tickets through a ticket company that we are calling Big Events Entertainment. Think of that from the user perspective. That hits home to me. But also think about it from business perspective. Big Events Entertainment doesn't know who's showing up to their concert. And so with that, they can't run analytics on who their average concert goer is, what they look like to run personalized marketing campaigns and send emails to them. It's a big headache both for business and customer experience. And what Prithvi is going to do right now is he's going to walk through the admin screen and then we'll come back and go through what the user sees. Prithvi, take it away.

Thanks, Ryan. So we actually understood a business use case. Now let's see how we can use that business use case for blockchain. So what is blockchain? Adam mentioned before that blockchain is a special kind of database. Here we have three partners. One is Big Events Entertainment, second is Block Next Ticketing, and the third one is Ticket Paradise. What's unique about all of them? If you look closely at the screen, all of the databases are same. This is a simulator. But you understand that in blockchain everything gets replicated on all the partner nodes. Let's understand a little bit on blockchain itself. You see multiple blocks that are part of the database here. Each block is dependent on the previous block and you see hashes as well. Let's go ahead and tamper one of the information in all the blocks. As you can see, each of the blocks had ticket information. As I tampered one of the information in one of the blocks, subsequent blocks actually changed, but other databases are still intact. What that means is that the network will reject that transaction. Why? Because its digital signature is completely different. Now that we understood a little bit about blockchain and how we can stop fraudulent behavior with this ticketing example, let's actually move on to actual demo. So here we are As a Salesforce blockchain admin looks and feels similar to Salesforce. Anyone disagrees? I don't think so. It is in Salesforce. But what's unique about this is that you can create blockchain apps with point and click interface. So you see a ticketing app here, right? Very straightforward. I can click and create one and all the information is available here. Let's jump to the partners. You will see that the partners that Ryan mentioned are already here. But what's unique about this, this can be also done using point and click interface. One of the partners here, which is ticket paradise is not a Salesforce customer. So we are democratizing blockchain not just for our customers, but also for our partners. The next step for the admin is to define the data model. So as you can see we have few data model which has been defined here. Some of them are customer events and tickets. But from a Salesforce blockchain point of view we have changed that paradigm. We have taken the metadata and declarativeness of Salesforce and applied it here. So what you can see is data model applied in blockchain world. Remember the original screen that we saw wherein everything was blocks. We didn't see any data model there. We just bunch of raw data. But here with point and click interface you can create blockchain data model. And this we call as distributed objects. This is very unique and special about Salesforce blockchain platform. Once that is done, the next step is to define business rules. Again we bring the power of lightning flows. With lightning flows I can define business rules which can run across the network. Here we have defined two rules in order to actually be run across the network. But everything here is declarative. Now everything is done. Admin has set up everything. Everything good to go, right? Excellent. But that is one magic that we bring to you. We bring the power of external objects. So not only did you see that with everything declarative we also make the lives of developer easy. So whatever you saw as distributed objects come back as external objects within Salesforce. Now you can run queries, you can run platform events, you can write pagely helps. But everything declarative, you can build beautiful apps using just these external objects. So what we have done here, we have given a blockchain builder for admins to set up blockchain. We are given external objects to create beautiful apps for our developers. Now let's see how a user can interact with blockchain. Over to you Ryan.

Thanks Prithvi. Now that we saw what it looks like for the developer and admin. Let's jump into the Salesforce user. It looks just like Salesforce. You're used to working in this every single day. So the barrier to entry and understanding how this works is very simple and straightforward. Let's look into the user, Dana. So Dana has a lot of tickets in her ticket arsenal. And what we're going to see here is it's not only her tickets, but you can also see that she has hotel stays. So everything that she has done through big events Entertainment and all of its trusted partners in their network is shown in one place. What we're going to try now is Dana no longer wants to go to the Celine Dion concert, unfortunately. So Dana is going to be transferring that Celine Dion concert ticket over to Prithvi. He's super excited. I know it. And so when we do that ticket transfer here, we did that through Block Next reseller. And they are a trusted Salesforce partner on community cloud. And so we can see that successful transaction and in big events Entertainment, they can see that that transaction has just happened and they know that Prithvi now is the proud owner of Celine Dion tickets. So that was for BlockNext, who is a Salesforce partner. But what we talked about earlier is everyone in your trusted network does not necessarily have to be a community cloud customer, though they should. But if they're not like Ticket paradise, they are able to view the blockchain and interact with all of the data using the blockchain Explorer. Explorer. Kind of cool, right? So you can extend your network to whoever you trust with that fabric of trust using blockchain.

So, Ryan, excellent demo, by the way. How many lines of code did we write to accomplish this scenario?

That has to be at least 1000.

Let me give you some hints. Okay, you are way off, so let me give you some hints. In Ethereum, which is a super powerful blockchain platform, it's around 200 lines of code. If you go and scroll up to the top, you see the data model embedded in the code itself works very good. That is another blockchain platform. And the code there is staggering. It's around thousand lines of code. Again, the same problem. You write the code metadata, everything in one place works as well. How many lines of code did we write?

500 now?

Not exactly. We wrote zero lines of code. With Salesforce blockchain platform, with metadata as well as all the flow, we could abstract everything and with point and click interface, we could get everything that you achieve with those code. So with Blockchain as well as Salesforce Blockchain platform. What we have seen is that we coupled the metadata and declarativeness of Salesforce, applied it for admins, developers as well as user, completely abstracting the blockchain technology.

The power of Salesforce blockchain and Salesforce platform builds a fabric of trust with your partners so that you can do many things, including this one ticket example. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

Back to you, Adam.

All right, awesome, guys. Thank you so much. So this morning you heard about Arizona State University. Now we heard about ticketing. And what's really interesting is we're seeing customers find value in our blockchain solution across a range of industries, a range of use cases, and also a maturity of use cases. So just real quick here on the left, some of our company customers, they just want blockchain properties. They don't care about all the benefits of blockchain. They want that immutable audit trail. Sometimes we call it the history object. Like we want that. Whether it's sharing data with the FDA or regulators or partners, some companies in the middle are all in. They want decentralization, they want smart contracts, they want immutability, they want logging it through your own infrastructure. Everything we're talking about today, this is more complex, bigger vision, and on the right, these are companies that they just want to consume. They don't want to get involved in governance and data models and infrastructure. They just want to log onto the network and benefit. So we're going to show an example now. We have an amazing partner of ours here, a design partner of ours, S and P of this middle column that are going all in with a huge vision. So I'd like to ask Chris Heussler from S and P Global Ratings, the chief commercial offer to come up and share their story with us.

Thanks a lot, Adam.

Great.

Thank you, Adam. That was great. And thanks for having us here. It's been a great pleasure to work with you guys. And I will say that the opportunity and everything that you highlighted across all of the demos really highlights the key point, which is this technology is incredibly robust and it gives us a lot of opportunity to work on and solve for our customer needs. So I'm going to start also with a disclosure statement. Not only have we been working with Salesforce on this project, but Salesforce is a customer of ours. And so as a customer of ours, we want to make sure that it's clear that all of the work that we do to develop this program sits outside of the decisions that we have from an analytic perspective. We value our analytics and the rating outcomes that we have. So I just want to highlight to everyone that two separate sides of the equation. So, but now getting onto it. Who is S and P Global? Who is S and P Global Ratings and why are we here? S and P Global is the leading provider in globally recognized benchmarks. We provide essential intelligence to decision makers around the world. S and P Global Ratings has a really wide reach with all of our clients. We operate in over 120 countries today. We have 1500 of the greatest analysts that do their job. And we provide over a million credit ratings in the market today, assessing over $46 trillion in debt. So when you think of the scale and scope and size of this business, it's massive. We touch clients in every part of the world, everything from large corporates to financial institutions to governments, anyone that wants to access markets and we try and help them access those markets. And so with that idea, you have to understand that there's huge amounts of data that moves back and forth between the organizations. And so the use case that we've worked on here is around our new customer onboarding. So think of yourself as a CFO or treasurer who's looking to access a market. We're going to gain or access a lot of public information. We're going to look at a lot of confidential information. How do we make sure that we gather that, use that with our analytic teams, but do it in a secure, robust fashion. And Blockchain gives us that ability. And so when we put our. The primary concept that we have at S and P is to keep the customer at the center of everything we do, make sure that they remain focused of all of us and giving them a secure way to interact with us is critical. And so the new customer onboarding and then the ability to provide them with a digital, a seamless digital experience is absolutely critical. And you're going to see a great example of a demo that we've built with the help of Salesforce to show you how, from a business to business perspective, blockchain can work. This has been a journey. This is not something that has happened overnight. And when we think about the process that we've been through, we started by making sure that we had great data. So we, you know, leveraging the Salesforce CRM platform and then making sure that all of our frontline teams had the robust information. So giving them apps and easy ways to access it and then lay around Einstein analytics on top of it so that we can actually use the data as leaders and make sure that we understand what our teams are doing, I'll show you in a second. But we're also very excited. We've implemented the voice solution and then also leveraging AI to mine that data. So it's really exciting. But then putting blockchain across all of it, it's really going to help us. It's going to give us so much more security. It's going to give us a lot more of the traceability, the trackability, everything that the Salesforce team already talked about. So we look at it and when we think about why we're doing this, our goal is to make sure that not only are we providing great service to our customers directly, but extracting that and giving customers great insights. And so we want to be able to connect all those pieces and understand exactly how that information is flowing. And Einstein analytics is helping us because now I've put effectively an iPad in the hands of every leader so that they can see exactly what the teams are doing. We can extract those insights and we can deliver them back to our customers. And making sure we know how we're doing it, using blockchain to better assist with that and then delivering it through a great platform. We developed ratings360 to make sure that we have a great front end interface, but we've now connected it with the blockchain technology. With Salesforce, we're talking about to make sure that the interaction with our customer is exceptional. Our goal is to make sure that we provide them with the best customer experience. And we have to do this. And when you think of the scale and scope that we're talking about, we can touch every major customer around the world with a seamless interface and with the security of blockchain behind it. So I'm going to hand it over to my colleague Marcus, who's going to talk about the actual technology. So, Marcus, over to you.

Yeah, great, thank you. First, I want to introduce everybody to the KYC process. Many of you may not be familiar with kyc. This is a know your customer process that all financial institutions are required to implement who sell financial products. So, for example, if somebody's coming to purchase or open a bank account, issue some debt, get a new loan, they have to go through this KYC process where you're asked all kinds of information that sometimes can be very probing. And on front of that, you want to make sure that you have a very robust and good customer experience. Right. You want your customer to be able to trust you. And as a credit rating agency, it's no different for us. However, what we're doing is we're asking for highly confidential information. We're asking for what's called material, non public information as well. This is information that if you have it, you could actually trade against the market with it because nobody else has that information. Naturally, as you can imagine, you want that to be secure. So with all of these things in mind, I want to tell you the top three reasons we decided on using the blockchain for our KYC process. First, non repudiation. Now, one of the things that we believe is going to be happening over time, and we're seeing some of this now, is that cyber attacks are going to shift from stealing information to also changing information. Can you imagine somebody picking up the phone and talking to you and saying, hey, you know what, I'm going to change some information about you. Nobody else is going to know. How threatening would that be? It would be terrifying, wouldn't it? Can you imagine if that were to happen to a government, to a state or to a municipality? It would be life changing.

Right?

So one of the nice things about the blockchain is that because of the way that it mathematically works, it allows us to be able to comfortably place things on the blockchain and for every transaction that occurs, further secure that data. This is a big deal for us, something that a normal database, all those data stores that we're used to using, don't do out of the box. Second, greater transparency. We've got teams around the world that we need to make sure have access to the same version of the truth. We want them to be comfortable seeing that, hey, this is what we've got and we can work with it without asking second or third or fourth questions. We also want to be able to build automation around that. And then thirdly, it's about resiliency. Another thing that we're seeing happening in networks that we're in today, networks we're going into, is that there's very sophisticated actors who are taking down nodes, attacking systems. And one of the nice things again about the blockchain, because of its decentralized nature, because of the consensus algorithms, because of all these different things we've been talking about today, it allows us to be able to have a node go down and everything can continue to operate as normal. And our analysts, the parties within our business, and of course our customers don't have to worry about the truth changing. So let me talk about the four Personas that are in the KYC process. First, you've got the data researcher. Data researcher is somebody who goes out, collects information about the customer. The reviewer is the person who validates it, approves it. The compliance team is somebody who goes and risk assesses it. And then the auditor just makes sure that you do what you say you're supposed to be doing or that you say you're doing. Now, I want you to focus in the center of this diagram, right? You can see that it's rather messy. We've got file shares, we've got databases, we've got email, we've got cloud, we've got Salesforce. But all together as one big mess. It's painful right now. Internally and externally, our processes have been validated, as you can imagine being S and P. So what this leads to is something called over processing, meaning that sometimes we'll go back and ask a client for the same information more than once. Sometimes we might run our criteria or our methodologies more than once, just to make sure that our calculations map out. That's not a very good user experience. So again, imagine this. The types of entities that we're working with are the largest on the planet. We're assessing the risk of governments, of states, of large structure deals that are very complex. Imagine having to go very deep and very broad and asking lots of different people for lots of small pieces of information. That's not something that you want to do more than once, right? It's a bit embarrassing if you have to do that. And the blockchain helps us avoid that kind of a problem. So now if we add the blockchain into the center, you can see the nodes are there, as opposed to the bit of the mess. One of those nodes goes down, we're fine. For example, the compliance officer, if his node goes down, he's able to continue to operate. He won't even know. Truth hasn't changed. He's able to continue operating just like he normally would. Another thing about this that's valuable is that we do something called surveillance. This may be a new term for some folks, but for the lifetime of debt that is issued, we have to go back and continually surveil or assess the business or the country that issued that debt. That can last for years, even decades. Another attribute of the blockchain is data lineage. We can go back in time to the beginning of when the first record was entered, all the way through to today, and feel comfortable that nothing has changed. And what we can do then with that record or that ledger, that distributed ledger, if you will, is we can hand that over to the regulator. And the regulator who we work with can also say this is something that we trust. This allows them to feel very comfortable that we're giving them a version of the truth. And then they can come back to us with advice that helps us be better and helps improve the market. So with that in mind, look, this is just one use case for the blockchain. There are others, as you can see here. And by the way, this is a very small list. Securitization, regulatory reporting, tokenization, debt origination, privacy, interbank transfers, trade finance. The list goes on and on and on. That's just financial services. We actually wrote a white paper on this. You can see the bitly link there. You're welcome to take a look at that. Structured finance using blockchain. But look, this is just one industry. Imagine the industries that all of you are working in. Are there uses for the blockchain? Even more if you're handling sensitive data, maybe there's a good use case. So hopefully the wheels are turning here about ways you might be able to use this technology. But enough talking for me. I think Dan's up next and, you know, for the demo, right? Yeah. Great.

Thank you, Marcus.

Thank you.

I've had the pleasure of supporting and working with S and P Global for the last couple of months on their blockchain project. And we've set it up very nicely now on just how important it is to them. And I'm really excited to be able to share with you what has come of that and the build. So the components or the people that are involved in this chain, we're going to step through them. You're going to see each of these partners that are part of their blockchain in the demo coming up. So we're going to go through a lot of screens, but you're going to see the value. And that's one thing that's really important for the blockchain is the network. So I want to just have this slide up for a second. As you realize this network is a primary reason we're going to be talking about the blockchain over here. Girvan is going to be driving our demo for us. He is from SMP Global and he is our blockchain expert. And you can see here he's logged into the blockchain builder. You saw this a little bit earlier. This is the SMP versions of it. We started with data, so we defined the data that was required. It was really important to know what we wanted to do, share the objects we wanted to put out. And it was done declaratively with clicks. But notice this isn't a custom object. It felt like creating a custom object, but we created a distributed object. And now once we knew what we wanted to share, we were able to reach out to our partners, reach out to that ecosystem or that network and say, this is the data that we've got. This is the data we want to interact with. Here's the list of those partners from that map you saw earlier. This is the part that now defines who gets to see it. So let's see what's actually happening in Salesforce. Let's see this blockchain in action. So we're gonna now be an S and P Global sales rep, logged in here as Kathy, looking at an opportunity. Kathy's customer, Shah, works for, or actually is, a co founder of Kirkland Energy. Shah has asked for some assistance from Kathy for one of the products that S and P Global offers because he wants to get a risk assessment of his company. With a good assessment, he'll be able to get more financing, he'll be able to grow his business. So it's a really important thing for Kirkland Energy and for Shaw. And so what we see here is we're going to start off with Kathy. She's working her opportunity and she's ready to send the engagement letter. This is the first step of that interaction on the blockchain. And as soon as we send the engagement letter that gets posted to the blockchain, that message then gets validated and comes back and confirms to Kathy that that has been validated on the blockchain. So let's see what's happening on Shaw's perspective. We're going to go over to the Rating360 portal. We're logged in as Shaw, and when we refresh the screen, we're going to see that message come back. This is coming from the blockchain again. He's on the Rating 360 portal that he's very familiar with. It's very powerful. But now he has a request. That request is from the blockchain. When he clicks on it, he sees that engagement letter generated from the data on the blockchain. He can go ahead and sign it. We can get into the cryptographic stuff at some point, but here we're just showing Shaw's engaging with the blockchain without having to do anything extra. He goes ahead and saves that record and goes back. And we now see Kathy's view. Kathy gets to see that that record has been updated. So it's now gone from contract sent to contract signed. Let's pause for a second and realize what just happened. That update came from the blockchain. That's a big difference. It felt like Salesforce, but it was a blockchain action. A real big differentiator. Kathy doesn't have to do anything. The process takes over. But she's comfortable. It's signed. We're now going to go ahead and bring in yet another one of those parties. We're going to bring in the research company. This is Richard Researcher's view of the blockchain. Again, completely separate environments. He's getting all the information you see on the screen here from the blockchain. Again, this is really important. He sees that record from his queue. He can click into it and we see the record. You got a little bit about what the KYC process is. It's very complex. It starts out with primarily an empty screen, but we're going to go ahead and jump. It's kind of like a cooking show. We're going to move forward, get to the data that Richard has now loaded and this is the finished record. So we can see here that Shaw Energy has a lot of related parties. Those are the board of directors, the key members of the Shaw. Sorry, of Shaw's company. We can see that they've got a little lock icon indicating that Richard's done the right research, uploaded the appropriate documentation. There was an annual report that was publicly available. Richard's uploaded that. He has now got a what he believes to be a really good case for an assessment, and now he can go ahead and submit that for approval. All of this again being logged to the blockchain. We're going to see a little bit about how that looks in a minute. But think of that. That data is now verified and stored on the blockchain that Richard has posted it. But we now need to go a little further. This is a very sophisticated and important process for SMP Global. So we now have an auditor or a compliance officer, which we're looking at here. This is Connor. Connor is a compliance officer at S and P Global. He can now view that record and see all the data that's been collected. This is really important that it's not just the data that Richard collected, but the data that Shah submitted, potentially data from Kathy or other third parties. All of that together is now in one easy place to see that's really important for Connor. Connor needs to make sure he's making the right decision as he goes to validate this. But Connor is a compliance officer. He may be sees the data and trusts it, but he's Looking to validate it, he wants to go one step further. So what he can do now and anybody on the network can do, is they can use the hashing capabilities of blockchain to validate this. So when he clicks validate, it's going to create a JSON object of the data that he sees here. He could double check and make sure everything was right, but he's going to copy that information. He knows that's what he was seeing on the screen. And you can see the hash value from the blockchain listed there. He can now open up any tool off the Internet and paste that JSON object and verify the hash is identical. This is that cryptographic signature between the two records. So what he was seeing in Salesforce he now can validate through an independent third party tool, that it's giving him the exact same hash. If I changed one letter, even a punctuation mark on that screen, that hash will no longer match what was stored on the blockchain. I can now validate the data. I trusted it, now I validate it. That's really important. And for Connor, he now feels comfortable that the data he is seeing is current. It was submitted by the people who promised. They submitted it and signed it. And now we can go ahead, give Shaw's company a great rating and say the assessment, bang on. This is wonderful. We go ahead and submit it. But let's see what that really looks like on the blockchain. This is a lightning web component, a fairly simple lightning web component that's pulling all of those blocks off of the blockchain. So this could be in any environment. You can now look at the viewer. And each one of these is one of those blocks we keep talking about. Each one of them has data associated with it. And as we click through it, you'll see on the right hand side, the block inspector is showing you the data that's from the blockchain. This is really what we mean when we talk about blockchains. A set of data in different blocks chained together. And everybody on the network can look at that data and validate it. This is really the power of the blockchain and at every step it's integrated in Salesforce third party environments and through APIs as well. So we're just about out of time. So I want to wrap up, thank SMP Global for the work they've done. They've also offered to join us downstairs at the blockchain booth on the first floor for some Q and A after this. So if anybody wants to join us we'd love to see you down there. And at this point, I'd love to have Adam come back up and wrap up for us. Thank you, Adam.

Awesome. All right, so that's a wrap, everybody. Huge thanks to everyone for joining our session today. Huge thanks to smp. Awesome partner, awesome design partner, awesome customer. We really appreciate all the great work together. So please head down to the first floor. As Dan said, check out our demos, interact with them, get a badge, take a trail, and thank you so much, everybody. Take care.