Daniela Sozzi, advisor and consultant to private equity-owned businesses in the European financial services space and founder of DNYC Limited, led a recent webcast to share how companies should think about blockchain integration – offering a disciplined, business-first perspective on when and how blockchain creates value and when it doesn’t.
The Strategic Frame: Needs, Solutions, and Technology
For any company on a blockchain integration journey, Daniela emphasized establishing the right use cases. Blockchain is a powerful tool, but it is not a magic wand. “It doesn’t fix a broken operating model,” she said. “If anything, it makes the flaws more expensive and more permanent.”
Her framework divides blockchain integration into three sequential steps: understanding business requirements, designing solutions that meet those requirements, and then building the technology combination that delivers the design. “No tool should be chosen before the use case has been identified and clarified,” she said.
Daniela acknowledged the pressure organizations face to move quickly, from vendors, shareholders, the press, and clients, but warned that caving to that pressure means approaching the problem from the wrong end. Blockchain technologies are expensive to build, implement, and maintain, and those costs manifest beyond the monetary. Preliminary analytical work isn’t optional; it’s where most of the real value gets created or destroyed.
Starting With Pain Points
The discovery phase begins with a rigorous analysis of the business itself: its products, client base, use cases, and operating model. The goal is to surface processes that absorb capital, erode margins, delay transactions, or cede ground to competitors.
She offered cross-border B2B payments as a practical example. The pain is well-known: high setup and operating costs, delays from time zones and holidays, reconciliation complexity, and compliance checks. Trade finance presents a similar picture. Investment fund unit trading, in some jurisdictions, can take days to settle. The analysis asks which of those pain points are within the business’s control, which belong to the broader ecosystem, and how they stack up against each other when assessed against the organization’s strategic priorities.
“It’s only by building a systematic approach,” she said, “that allows you to reference every pain point against the strategic priorities of the business” and arrive at a consistent internal ranking.
Designing the Solution
Once requirements are identified and prioritized, the solution design phase begins. The key questions here concern what digital assets and logic are involved (real-world asset tokenization, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, smart contracts), how custody and control will be managed, and what partnerships or third-party relationships the solution requires.
Interoperability deserves particular attention at this stage. Different blockchain don’t communicate with each other or with traditional enterprise systems. If the solution requires those bridges, they must be specified at the design stage. “Otherwise, it becomes a pointless solution,” Daniela said.
Customization and scale requirements also need to be spelled out before any technical architecture is chosen, so that technology specifications can be matched to them.
Technology Implementation: The Last Step, Not the First
Only after business requirements are clear and a solution has been designed should an organization engage with the specifics of technology implementation. At this stage, the technical architecture takes shape: which existing blockchain networks to use, whether to develop an in-house private blockchain, and how to combine different layers and components into a functioning whole.
Hybrid solutions, she argued, are often more advisable than pure blockchain implementations that drift from the original business design to accommodate available technology. “The tech delivery stage needs to stay as close as possible to the business needs that have been identified,” she said.
A Concrete Example: Stablecoins in FX
To ground the framework in something tangible, Daniela walked through the use of stablecoins in foreign exchange fees. For businesses operating across high-cost, slow corridors, where foreign exchange fees are high and settlement times are measured in days, the so-called “stablecoin sandwich” offers a potential alternative: convert fiat currency to stablecoins, execute the transaction across the 24/7 stablecoin market, and convert back to the destination fiat currency.
Settlement times can shift from days to minutes. Hedging costs and foreign exchange fees can be lower. The stablecoin market doesn’t close for bank holidays or time zones. She was careful not to oversimplify – there are still fees and intermediaries involved – but noted that for recurring, sizeable transactions on specific corridors, stablecoins can outperform traditional routes. She also flagged a current-events dimension: since the introduction of US tariffs, many businesses want to reduce dependence on US dollar accounts and correspondent banking relationships, accelerating interest in stablecoin-based solutions.
Common Strategic Pitfalls
As Daniela moved toward her closing remarks, she outlined the strategic pitfalls most likely to derail even well-funded blockchain initiatives. Among them: confusing what a technology is capable of with what it is legally permitted to do, building a solution optimized for one market and discovering it doesn’t replicate in another due to regulatory differences, and copying competitors without accounting for differences in legal structure or operational setup.
Smart contracts drew specific attention. They are not legal contracts, she emphasized – they are code that executes an action. The legal frameworks, governance structures, and liability arrangements required to make their outcomes contractually binding still need to exist alongside the technology. “It’s a business decision that comes before technology delivery.”
She also challenged the view, held by some technologists, that blockchain transparency can substitute for AML monitoring and reporting obligations. “Blockchain technologies are a tool to support regulatory compliance. They cannot be a tool to bypass it.”
On the topic of challenges ahead, Daniela pointed to a combination, arriving at increasing speed. “The selection we’ll see in the competitive arena is not so much between adopter and non-adopter, but between those who can adapt and change fast, and those who cannot move at the same pace.” Paradoxically, some early blockchain adopters are no better positioned today than organizations that never implemented anything because they moved fast without moving well.
“Success in blockchain today means setting off to solve painful problems with a solution that is fit for purpose – one that doesn’t leave you worse off than where you started.”
Register to watch the webcast replay here.
