Hey, and welcome back to The Interline Podcast. 

Blockchain. Now, there’s a word with a lot of connotations and a ton of baggage. It’s also one you can use as a jump scare in certain communities that had their fingers burned during the NFT wave, which is something we covered in my interview with Karinna Grant earlier in the year. It’s also, triply, a word with a lot of enduring applications. One with deep hooks into the global financial system and one with ongoing enterprise adoption that transcends what you’re probably thinking of when I said blockchain, which is a subset of digital product passport applications. 

So I figured it was time to get back up to speed, shed some preconceptions and get an executive level update on why enterprise blockchain adoption diverged so far from consumer facing use cases and on what criteria the world’s biggest companies are using to determine whether or not to deploy blockchain as a system of truth. 

To get that perspective, I brought on Clare Adelgren, who is the Global Blockchain Leader at EY, which you might know better by its old name, Ernst & Young, and which is widely recognised as one of the big four accounting firms. 

Clare and I have spoken before off the record. So over the course of our conversation, you might hear a couple of hints at that prior chat. But mainly, I wanted to bring you today a whole new set of questions and answers that are pitched at understanding what’s actually happening with blockchain in fashion in 2026 and why now might be the time to refresh your understanding of it if, like a lot of people, you have it filed away in your head under NFTs, crypto and luxury authenticity pilots. 

So let’s get into it.

NB. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

Okay, Clare Adelgren, welcome to The Interline Podcast.

Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

A pleasure to have you. Now walk us through what your typical working day looks like at the moment because Global Blockchain Leader, which is your title, is a title that could carry a lot of different connotations and I’d like to get us underway by understanding what your work actually encompasses, what your kind of morning, lunch, afternoon, evening looks like and the type of clients. 

Great question. I think, to give the listeners a little bit of context, it’s helpful to understand what our mission is at EY, the way that we think about blockchain and blockchain for our clients. EY started our journey 10 years ago and we started investing in this space because we understood early that public blockchains would be a disruptive technology for our clients and our clients are typically institutions and enterprises, often very large and very global. 

And so because of that mission, we’ve consistently invested in three core areas. We knew early that public blockchain would require privacy because for a B2B transaction, a use case, confidentiality would matter. And so it needed to be solved without compromising the decentralisation benefits of blockchain. So we have an R&D team that’s focused on that. 

We also wanted enterprise-grade solutions for these clients, and so we have a product engineering team that is building out that suite of solutions. And we needed to educate, so we spend a lot of time in the ecosystem in general. 

And so my day-to-day is very much about doing all of those three things. I spend time, typically, doing strategy or operations of our business, which can be in the complexities around compliance and how does it apply to our business? What should we be doing? What’s not relevant for our business? I can be working with clients, trying to figure out how they can change their organisation or where’s the benefit of using this and I can just tell you as well that the blockchain piece of it – the technology piece of it is often the easy part – the changing how organisations work together, that’s the hard part and that can be internal or external.

Mm-hmm. That sounds very familiar to a lot of other technology. Enabled or technology adjacent transformations is almost the software, is the prescriptive and the prescribed and the definitionally simpler part, and then managing people and understanding the drive for change and trying to chart a long-term vision for it much, much harder. Yeah, I don’t think that’s unique to this space, but I think as we’ll get into, there are some bits that are unique to this space that this fascinating area to dive into. 

On that, I always like to do definitions with these shows. I always like to quiz people on things that we take as read or things that feel kind of axiomatic and that you would normally leave out of a conversation and just gloss over it. And I want to do a big one with you, which is, definitionally, what is a blockchain from your point of view? 

Because when you think about financial instruments, distributed ledgers, people have very different ways of talking about blockchain that depend really heavily on what they’re trying to get out of it. And I have a feeling that maybe your definition is going to be a bit more balanced and it’s certainly going to involve more of that change in operation models that you’ve just talked about.

Yes, and I think you framed it well with the comment that you just made where many of the things we’re experiencing are like other technologies. So blockchain is a shared infrastructure and it’s a shared infrastructure for shared truth. It’s a way for multiple organisations who perhaps don’t fully trust each other, or more importantly don’t want a single party owning the data or the database, to agree on the same record of events. And with that comes a sort of tamper evidence trail that comes with it. So blockchain reduces the friction by making a record verifiable following rules. So a smart contract allows you to automate parts of the operating model that can make this flow in such a way that by having that shared infrastructure with a shared truth, it gives you fewer intermediaries, faster settlement, clearer accountability, and better auditability. So those would be the outcomes.

Okay, that’s actually a really useful definition. And it does exactly what I hoped you were going to do, which is give it a more objective use case, independent sector, independent framing. And I think that’s something we can carry forward as we go through the rest of this conversation as well. 

Now, I mentioned that people’s connotations and people’s preconceptions of blockchain are pretty heavily coloured by what they’ve seen it used for before. Whether those use cases are necessarily aligned with that concept of shared truth or whether they diverge from it, a lot of people have prior, when it comes to seeing what blockchain has been intended to be used for. And I think there’s a couple of those that are especially relevant for people in fashion. 

Now, the first of those is NFTs, and it’s the consumer-oriented idea of decentralised digital ownership. I think fashion – and I’m using fashion as a broad category here to cover apparel, footwear, accessories, beauty to some extent – went after that opportunity more than maybe any other sectors outside of the art world. And it’s no secret that most of those initiatives found themselves abandoned. The highest profile marketplace and platform that was left in the NFT space folded just before Christmas. 

I know you work at a very different end of blockchain, more in the B2B space, but I want to get your perspective on why you think it is that the consumer push diverged so much from the enterprise trajectory? Very clearly enterprise adoption for blockchain is still continuing. Consumer adoption outside of crypto maybe less so. Why was that the case when the same principles and the same technology were behind both of them? Is it a matter of complexity? Is it technology platform maturity? Were NFTs the wrong use case for the principle? I’m keen to see what you think.

Mmm. Yeah, it’s a really good question. I do separate the technology from a go-to-market. And I think that the period that you’re talking about, the NFTs and the way, especially the way that maybe fashion or just the consumer industry in general, in much broader sense, very often what was being packaged was a high velocity consumer experiment that was also, it’s fair to say, the time, layered on top of what was quite an immature experience stack. So they were very often hype-driven with an immature UX. So there was lots of friction in what we call the wallets and everything else. 

But most importantly, very often those ideas had an unclear long-term value for the consumer, right? And so what happened when fashion leaned in early, but many of those initiatives were built on novelty and hype rather than that durable valuable, which meant that as soon as the market sentiment sort of turned or moved onto the next shiny object, budgets and attention moved on too, right? That’s how those types of opportunities work, those experiments work.

And I think that quite in contrast to that, when you think about the more enterprise adoption and infrastructure that you’re describing of what’s happening in the B2B space, enterprises work differently. So they think and they move slower, first of all, but also it’s anchored in an operational ROI. So it’s about compliance, auditability, traceability, settlements, it’s about reducing my risk. And those use cases, they don’t depend on consumer speculation, but they depend on a process improvement and regulatory direction. 

And so it’s not about the technology failing or some things having to go through this kind of, it’s not suitable, I think it’s more that one set of use cases mature to more infrastructure as we would describe it today. And the other one is still searching for product market fit, right? 

I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know for sure whether we won’t see some of those things come back at some time, but I just think that they need to mature into a stronger product market fit. Who’s my audience? What am I creating? What’s the long-term value that I’m creating for them?

Mm-hmm. That’s a really good summary. And I think as well, that those consumer facing, high velocity, sort of hype driven pushes. They also ran counter to what the prevailing commercial model is for brands and for digital spaces. The incentives for the companies involved were not really aligned with what people wanted to accomplish, at least on the surface. And I agree that the technology seemed to have served its purpose. 

I mentioned, you know, the high-profile fashion NFT marketplace that finally folded. As it turned out, the people who bought things from there did have, you know, verifiably scarce digital blockchain backed assets that outlived the platform itself. The technology did function. It was just a use case with limited appeal. I think that’s probably the right way to think about it. Does that appeal circle back around? Do external conditions revalidate it? I think you’re right to keep that one open. I’m not closing the door on the concept myself. I was never really a big Web3 NFT person in the fashion space, but I will say that it seems like the core technology was sound. It was everything else around it that was at fault.

Yeah, and I would just as well say you can look at the parallel. One of the other very early use cases that we all know that often gets attached to blockchain is, of course, cryptocurrencies that have a lot of the same kind of characteristics in terms of velocity. And, you know, they’ve also stuck around. There’s an audience for those and there’s definitely a consumer that likes that in the finance world, but it’s not necessarily for everybody.

Yeah. Okay. Then just thinking back to the kind of preconceived notions, connotations that fashion audiences will have, I think the other place that our listeners’ minds will go when you mention blockchain is providence and authenticity, that upstream truth. And that’s also a space that’s got a similarly checkered history to what we’ve just talked about, but probably a brighter outlook, I think, than the current state of ownership of digital collectibles. 

Now, I think we’ve been through phases on this. At one point there’s no shortage of startups who are offering blockchain backed upstream visibility, transparency traceability solutions. Not many of those are still around. And we also saw some larger companies like Providence try and apply an outwardly explicitly blockchain-backed model that seemed to be working in cosmetics and food and beverage to fashion, only to then sort of abandon the fashion market and then actually abandon a lot of the blockchain branding as well.

So it seemed for a time like that was also going to be a use case for the finite shelf life and maybe a limited audience. It now seems like we’re coming back around to this. You have serious companies like TextileGenesis who are architecting fibre-forward traceability on top of blockchain principles, even if they don’t describe themselves as blockchain companies. A massive panel of companies right now who are promising to give you turnkey digital product passports that have some measure of blockchain backing, and I’m sure some of the work that you do at EY falls into this sort of provenance and product passport space as well. 

What changed there? Because that feels like, again, the technology in theory should have worked. And what we’ve had is cycles of adoption and cycles of maturity. Is it the case that regulation is what’s been the trigger for the most recent turnaround to this? Is it that digital product passports are becoming mandatory? Was it just the sheer amount of disruption happening upstream in the supply chain that made a new business case for it? Was the technology getting better? Because this one to me doesn’t seem anywhere near as sort of, I can’t close the book on it and say maybe that’ll come back someday the way that I think I can with NFTs.

Yeah, so I think that it’s all three, to be really honest with you. I think there’s three different dynamics that are happening at the same time, which is why it’s maturing into what will become more sort of plumbing and building of the plumbing that we need for this future space. 

So regulation, I see as in the first place is sort of acting as the forcing function. And it’s what’s turning it from being a ‘nice to have’, you know, maybe we’ll be cool and innovative if we implement this thing into a, ‘need to be’ building plumbing. We need to be actually making sure that we’ve got a way to deliver. And you know, in Europe, you’ve got ESPR and that sort of really entered into a force behind it. And the digital product passports are a mechanism to be able to enable that. And what digital product passports do, of course, is they make product-level data that’s available, but they make it durable and standardised and enforceable. And so they’re providing a function to deliver out a way that’s nice and easy for companies to actually start to build out the plumbing that they need in their enterprise. 

And then at the same time, there’s this disruption. And the disruption that I would point to is you think about everything that’s happening in the macroeconomic environment that we’ve had almost since the pandemic, but we’ve had a sort of series of events and geopolitical activities and more increased scrutiny of supply chains that all in all makes it really difficult for leaders to be able to manage their risk through what was spreadsheets and paper certifications and all of the different red tape, as they would say, to be able to make it affordable and efficient to run.

And then you have this third pillar that during this phase and during this sort of learning and realisation of what’s needed in terms of plumbing, implement, the sort of the stack, the technology stack that underlines it, and I include quite a lot when I say that, is maturing. So there’s better identity, the standards, data standards have improved. There’s better ways to tag the QRs, the NFCs, and just more pragmatic architectures that make it more feasible. And so you’ve got all of these things that are maturing together in parallel to each other that are offering a different way to solve for this longer term. 

And so that’s why I think you see this a little bit more aligned to what I said before. It’s a little bit slow and steady. You need all of these piece parts for it to work for an enterprise.

Okay, again, really good answer. I think tied to what you’ve just said, one of the probably two perennial questions, I think, when it comes to blockchain applications, applications use cases that are blockchain backed to a greater or lesser extent is people will say, well, why can I not just do that with a database, with a centralised database with one or more front end interfaces built around it, multiple stakeholders around it? What is it about blockchain in one of these use cases that makes it more uniquely suited to creating that consistent standardised truth than a database? 

And to get us to that, could you pick one example of a project that you’ve been involved in or you’ve overseen that either demonstrates capabilities or governance that would have been impossible to achieve with a database or that would have been prohibitively expensive or time consuming to build that traditional way?

Yeah, so I have to say that I actually think that this question of, why not just a database? Why can’t I use something that I’ve already got in my toolkit? It’s a really healthy question. And we very often start at this question when we’re discussing blockchain and blockchain use cases. And what I would say is, it’s very healthy because you have to look at the ‘why’ you’re looking to implement it. So if one company controls the process of whatever it is that you’re implementing end-to-end, a database is often fine. A database will suffice. If you have the data and it’s all your data and you control the process, then check in the box.

Blockchain becomes compelling when multiple parties need a shared record without handing control to any one single intermediary. So, you know, a database can be set up with that. So you set up a database, but very often it’s the governance and the trust that is what gets expensive. That’s where you often need to engage third parties. That’s when you often need to be able to have somebody else come in and be that intermediary for you to be the sort of independent party in between. And so I think that’s the way that you have to really think about it. You need to think of it in terms of the full process and what does that look like operationally to be able to do that.

And you know, a really good example, I can give you an example of something that’s part of our product suite, right, which is the implementation of managing a B2B contract on a public blockchain. And we do that. We have an offering which is very specifically towards managing renewable energy contracts, which is relevant across multiple different sectors. These contracts last for multiple years. They have multiple parties involved and they’re quite complex, but you would like to be able to see on a day-by-day basis where you stand in terms of that contract. By putting the terms of the contract onto the public blockchain to manage those terms, all parties involved can see real data as it is at one time. It’s not one party’s view against the other party’s view. They’re able to let it govern. And it’s cheaper and quicker because it is real-time and because it’s available 24/7 and because there aren’t any intermediary costs involved.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that’s good. I think where people’s minds tend to go with stuff like this is if I think about I’m a fashion brand and I have all of my core product data and my supplier management and a lot of other kinds of essential information and attributes are captured in a lifecycle management system. I work with one or more partners to bring those products to market. Those partners are upstream of me. In most cases, I can provision the users for that. So we assume that that is a database-backed solution and that I, as the brand, have central provisioning and that I bring online partners. That’s fine up to the point where you have the need to step aside from that and say, well, we have a multi-tier supply chain made up of lots of different stages and tiers of inputs. Each of those stages and tiers of inputs have complicated handoffs and contracts and negotiations with one another. And as that product then starts to crystallise from all of those pieces into something finished that’s making its way towards the consumer, all of a sudden you’re way outside of the world where any one person should be provisioning users and any one person should be in full control of the chain of custody. 

So I think the way you’ve described it is really good. And I think it’s just for fashion’s purposes, there are places where database-backed applications are probably a fine solution and then there are places like this where so much visibility leaks out, so much opportunity to negotiate on better terms, so much opportunity for chain of custody and accountability. There are just big gaps and it does seem like there’s a potential to plug those.

Yeah, I would totally agree with that. You know, I think the sort of ‘aha moment’ lies very often in and around the where and the when and the why you need to have digital product passports. And very often this is data that needs to go way beyond where your sort of normal control would reach as an enterprise, even if you’re a really big player in the fashion industry or you’re a really big player in a consumer goods market. Very often what’s being asked from a sort of a longevity and a provenance perspective, it’s going beyond that. And therefore, you need different solutions. So these are very often new use cases that we didn’t have 10 years ago either. 

Yeah, absolutely. Nobody’s 100% vertically integrated. And I think fashion as an industry, if I can characterise it in one sweeping statement, is that everybody wishes they were more vertically integrated and they’re trying to exert greater visibility and control over all of those kinds of complicated processes.

Aside from what you’ve just mentioned, where, as we’ve said, there’s plenty of arguments to say, well, maybe this can be done with a database. How often do you find yourself advising clients not to use a blockchain for something they want to? Are there any other outcomes, any other sort of desired states, any common visions where you would say, actually I don’t think a blockchain is the right one for this. I don’t think it’s the right architecture.

Yeah, so I really see myself as pro-outcome, not pro-blockchain. And so actually, it’s pretty often. It’s actually becoming a little bit less because I think there’s a better understanding out in the marketplace about what blockchain is and its core benefits. But still, it is pretty often. And I think it’s a sign of maturity to be able to discuss it this way, not skepticism. And we still, we start with just three very, very basic questions every single time. Is it multi-party? Is it trust or reconciliation a real cost today? Is it a real cost for you today in this context? And does the record need to hold up across organisations? 

And when you answer those three questions, if you’ve really framed out what it is that you’re doing and the process that you’re talking to, if the answer is no, then don’t use blockchain. There’s probably a lot of other slightly quicker, lighter, more efficient solutions very often that you already have in your architecture that you can use to solve the same problem.

Okay, that’s really, really good framing. 

Now, what does the typical sort of technology infrastructure look like for an enterprise blockchain deployment? Like what proportion of the projects you’ve been involved in are based on public blockchains, which you talked about before, and the kinds of tokenisation systems that listeners are probably familiar with, because they’re part of the sort of Ethereum family, ERC-20 and so on, versus how many are more bespoke or based on permission systems?

Yeah, so this is something that’s changed over time. So first of all, what do the enterprises look like today? And you’ll see that any sort of enterprise architecture, any sort of CIO that’s looking over their enterprise today, the majority of what they have, it’s very hybrid and there are all sorts of on-prem cloud, various different solutions that they’re working with and blockchain might be a piece of that. It might be just to the periphery of it, very specifically for those operational transactions or interactions that happen between you and another organisation. So we’re sort of sitting just a little bit beyond where the firewall normally sits. I think that’s just contextually really helpful to understand. 

And then when it comes to us and the work that we do, I think we were very, very clear in our strategy very early at EY that when it came to building the solutions that we build, that we believed wholeheartedly that the true value of blockchain lies in its decentralised nature. Otherwise there are other options available to you. And therefore our solutions are all on public blockchain.

So when we’re selling our own product and we’re delivering to our clients that use our solutions, those are all on public blockchain today. We work with a lot of other clients though when we deliver a lot of other services from EY and other clients might have bespoke solutions or have created sort of other private networks over the years that they work with and they might ask us for help with those and those services would be anything from tax services to audit services to strategy and otherwise. 

But we have a very strong belief that when you really think about the long-term value of this technology versus a lot of the other options that you have for infrastructure, this particular infrastructure has the most value and really you capitalise on that when you’re actually operating on the public blockchain.

It requires that you accept with it the characteristics that come with that.

It does represent a mindset shift from essentially operating at arm’s length, but within a very well ring-fenced environment with partners to taking on board the principles of public blockchain rather than just the technology pillows of it. 

Kind of semi-related to that, it seems like the decentralised finance side of blockchain has really got its hooks into the financial system at the minute in terms of assets, asset tokenisation, derivatives, as well as payments and privacy. It seems like there was a period where provenance traceability applications were the headline use cases. It seems like now they’re financial in nature. Do you see any impact there for the B2B side of fashion in terms of how different actors we talked about in the multi-tier supply chain, how those different actors transact and interact with one another? 

The things that come to mind for me are international payments, currency hedging in a market where commodity prices are super volatile, maybe smart contracts between brands and their upstream partners and upstream partners and their upstream partners. I’m probably looking at it through a limited lens though. What’s your take on that?

Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. An awful lot has happened in the sort of tokenisation and finance and digital assets in general that I would fully expect that the fashion industry wants to be able to take advantage of for efficiencies in their business. 

So where does it matter? It matters whenever it hits cash. So I think that it’s gonna be especially true where you see companies that transact across borders and are managing their working capital and the management of that working capital is absolutely critical to their bottom line, to be really honest with you. So there’s an immediate bridge when it comes to payments and settlements – stablecoins, programmable payments that can reduce the friction for cross-border supplier payments, for example. They speed up the settlements and they can potentially shrink fees and foreign exchange efficiencies. 

And so there are a lot of benefits being seen across all sectors, I would say, when it comes to payments and settlements. It’s faster, it’s cheaper, and it’s also available 24/7, which becomes really important in global operations in actual fact. 

And then the second one that you’re alluding to is, what does that open up? If you have those rails and you have that infrastructure in place, then you can think about trade and supply chain financing. So once you’ve got better product and shipment data, which might be anchored in some of those early provenance records that you refer to, but you can imagine that you’ve got information that can be more automated, leading to more automated financing flows, invoice factoring, inventory financing. You can do milestone-based release of funds. So you can build in very direct and very real sort of improvements into what would ordinarily cause your supply chain to slow down and just building more friction to your business. 

The third one is that, you know, tokenisation in and of itself changes this infrastructure rails, as I’ve talked about, right? So even if I think of you as the buyer or as the user, you might never see it, right? This is not the same as NFTs and wallets. This is like the infrastructure that it’s running on. And so you might never see it. And if capital markets and payments are being modernised as they are right now within the finance industry, then it’s almost like the fashion supply chains will ultimately just plug into that and get the benefit of that. 

And so it’s probably going to happen anyway, is what I would say. And probably with great outcomes, I think. Then anything that you’ve implemented or you’ve done within provenance or DPPs or that information flow, they’re not just compliance artifacts, but they can also be used as signals that can be used to impact how you’re reducing your risk in financing and insurance and some of these other very real sort of gains on your bottom line, just because you have that information available in that format.

Yeah, that’s a fascinating point of view. I think that the financial industry, the backbone is moving, and a lot of other industries will follow with it. And fashion, we tend to talk about it as a product-centric industry. It is a very capital intensive market. People will routinely say, I have a huge amount of capital bound up in inventory or I have a huge amount that is not moving through the supply chain. You are at end of the day moving chunks of value around between parties and that value can get quite illiquid at certain points of time and then suddenly become liquid and I think you’re right, fashion has much deeper ties into finance than we tend to talk about.

And what do you think about enterprise applications? Especially relevant I wanted to ask you one of the questions kind of definitionally around blockchain which was the idea of the quality of the information that makes its way on the chain. Now, I’m on record, I think, before saying that there are good blockchain-backed solutions to data transport and integrity, that truth piece that you talked about before. But in a lot of cases, fashion doesn’t actually have a data transport problem, at least not primarily. It has a data input problem. It has sanitisation of inputs, reliability and trust at source. 

How do you approach the challenge of needing to capture reliable information at source when that source is maybe a human being or an unreliable census suite on the other side of the world? And what’s the incentive for the person on the other side of the world to participate?

Yeah, and this is a really important point in making Ben. Blockchains preserve integrity. They don’t create truth. And so when we think about implementing, and I know that we talked earlier about some of the work that did with the Bvlgari group and their DPP sort of implementation that they were doing on Aura, right? The work wasn’t just about the ledger, it’s very, very much about designing the process flow end-to-end. 

So a very early outcome was standardising data collection across business lines, identifying gaps, and then implementing process improvements to ensure more accurate data collection, including end-to-end process. And you can say that as this evolves, there are many, many ways to improve and use a sort of more layered verification process. Yes, there’s human attestation and there’s sort of integrating supply documentation, there’s spot audits, there’s all of those things that I think you would recognise, you know, when you implement, you have to actually think about the flow across the board using sensors, using lab verifications. Of course, now we have as well AI, which again can be able to manage and strengthen those processes with as few handovers as possible. But you have to sort of look at all the layers of the stack and end-to-end within the process. 

And so I do think that that work is important work when you’re implementing any technology and especially when it’s coming to the blockchain. The blockchain does provide an incredible way to give you that, to preserve that integrity of that sort of investment that you do into the quality of your data and the quality of your process without a doubt. And the benefits of course is that ultimately then you can have this faster, cheaper way of maintaining the auditability over time so you get the benefits at the top end.

Yeah, makes sense. The work of obtaining truth in the first place is a separate, not separate, it’s a related initiative. 

Yeah, an incredibly important one, I think. And again, I would just say that because these are many new use cases, needing the standardisation and what this data is, if we think about many of the aspects of the regulations coming through, especially in the fashion industry, that data didn’t really exist previously. Those processes weren’t really in place because they’re new asks, if you like, from a reporting perspective. And so that’s real work that has to be done.

Now, you mentioned AI before from a kind of input level. I’m going to ask you about it from a slightly different angle, which is obviously AI is sucking up a lot of the air in the room when we speak about technology in general, not just in terms of budgets and attention for enterprise. 

You mentioned ‘shiny objects syndrome’ before, definitely a thing, but also as a bit of a lightning rod for technical talent. It feels like maybe the kinds of people who a few years ago would have become solidity programmers and choose to go work in blockchain, are maybe saying, I’m going to go work in AI instead. What do you think the outlook for blockchain is in that context? Are the two areas mutually exclusive? Am I just making a false equivalence here? And is blockchain experiencing maybe the same realisation that AI initiatives are getting towards now, which is that technical expertise is part of it, but that what’s really in short supply is expertise, strategic thinking and taste, all of which are non-technical skills.

Yeah, really, really good question. So I see AI and blockchain very much as complementary. So they’re definitely not mutually exclusive. And why I say that is AI systems in and of themselves, they’re only going to be as good as the provenance or the integrity of the data that they’re trained on and that they make their decisions based on. And blockchain, of course, has its strengths in being able to provide verifiable provenance and permissions and audit trails. And so these are two incredibly complementary technologies of their time and will continue to grow in parallel as they are. One’s the infrastructure, one’s about productivity and the other’s all about an infrastructure layer that’s needed underneath. So they go hand in hand in many, many different ways. 

But the talent question is a very real one. And I would say, yes, AI is grabbing a huge amount of attention and in some ways it feels like we’re saying the same message that we’ve said for many, many years in tech. We just need more talent. We need more people to come into tech and they’re very, very much needed and will continue to be needed for, I think, years to come. And you’ll see maybe people make their choices depending on their passions and their interests. 

But you touched on another point, and it is one that I’ve talked a lot about that’s certainly in the blockchain space. I see it, and I see it when I go and talk to universities and students and student bodies, is that we’re still certainly in the blockchain space. I see that there is still the need for an awful lot of other talent beyond just the tech talent. It’s not just the data scientists, it’s not just the programmers that we need in the blockchain space, and it’s not just the sort of finance majors that we need in there. We need, you know, lawyers, we need people that can write contracts, we need people that can understand how they extend risk frameworks, we need the knowledge and the understanding of these technologies impacts.  All of those different talent categories. And so a lot of the ecosystem work that I talked about is really about understanding the impact on these jobs and what that means for new practitioners and people early in their career about rethinking maybe what the opportunities are for them in a whole very wide range of different domain expertise I would say.

Okay, so to bring us nearly to a close, if a Chief Supply Chain Officer, Chief Sourcing Officer, or somebody who was otherwise involved in the upstream processes of risk management at a hypothetical fashion brand came to you and they said, I’ve got limited software and talent budget, where and how should I be investing that? Rather than ask what would you recommend to them, I’m going to ask what would you ask them in return? What conditions would need to be true in their answers for you to make a recommendation about their readiness and their maturity.

Yeah, so I would want to know first and foremost what matters most to them in the next 12 to 18 months. Where do they see their biggest opportunity for them and their business? Where do they see their biggest risk? What is that risk? And where do they see their challenges? And I think we would spend quite a lot of time really trying to narrow down what the outcome is that we’re looking to solve for, because if you know what that outcome is, then it’s so much easier to answer those three questions that I mentioned earlier: is it multi-party? Is it at what level of your business is it? And so that in itself will tell me, is it the provenance? Is it the data? Is it answering some of these requirements that are coming down the pipe from a regulated perspective? Or is it the opportunities that are coming through the new?

finance rails, the work that’s going on in capital markets, the work that’s going on in being able to offer new settlement solutions that would be able to deliver some of those outcomes. 

And so start with what it is that you really want to make happen, what matters.

That’s good framing. Finally, you have EY’s Global Blockchain Summit coming up next week [at the time we are recording this, so we’re recording in the middle of March] And that’s happening in New York. What’s on the agenda there that you think is maybe flying under the radar right now? Remaining aware that our audience is fashion, and retail sort of decision makers. What is it that you think is getting under discussed, under exposed, but that’s probably going to become increasingly relevant for our audience over the next, let’s say, 12-24 months? 

Yeah, thank you. So we have our annual summit every year, three days, and we bring together the ecosystem. Many of our clients, institutions, enterprises come and join for three days of pretty intense. And we very much focus on where the market is today. Where are we? What’s going on? Who’s doing what? And driving those conversations around it. 

And this time around for 2026, in the market there’s a huge focus on this impact of payments and settlements and what that offers and what the opportunities are to many of our global clients around the world. But also talking a lot, we always get into as well. So what are the challenges? What does it mean? How do you get started? Where do you begin?

A big part of it is regulation, the shifting regulatory landscape, being able to see what’s coming down the path. So we always spend some time on that because I think breaking that down into manageable piece parts is incredibly important. The third topic, which I will add, which is something to keep an eye on, but it’s becoming incredibly important now. We’ve invested for a long time in this space, but if you can see and recognise that blockchain technology is of its most value when you retain its decentralised nature and you’re using the public blockchain. You also know that you need privacy. You need that confidentiality in B2B. We, this time around, will have a whole day on privacy and how that’s shaping up on a public blockchain today. 

So that’s taken some time to get to. But it really is part of what’s making it implementable now. It’s a maturity of the stack and a maturity of the way that public blockchains are being implemented today that gives you the opportunity to retain confidentiality in those transactions.

Yeah, and I would say that is actually one of the objections that fashion brands, particularly in the luxury end of the market, have had historically is a concern around privacy, concern around intellectual property, options to embrace the principles but without necessarily fully opening the books, if that makes sense. 

Okay, well, it sounds fascinating and I wish you every success. With that, I’ll be keen to see the output of the event.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Clare, thank you so much for joining me. This was a good conversation. I hope it’s one we get to revisit at some point in the future.

Thank you. Thank you.

And that’s the end of my chat with Clare. I think we landed in a pretty objective, even-handed sort of place there. And hopefully it’s given you something to think about. We cover product creation a lot here at The Interline. So phrases like, when it touches cash, can feel quite remote for the design, the development, the garment engineering, the sourcing community. But the reality is that everybody who’s listening to this is in the business of turning creative ideas into profitable ones. So finance matters just as much as provenance, as trust, and as multi-stakeholder accountability. 

On a separate note, we’re now about 25 episodes, probably a few more by the time you hear this, into this second season of The Interline Podcast. And while I think we’re starting to really hit our stride, and you’re going to see that manifest itself in the kinds of folks we interview and I go about it over the coming weeks, I really do want to know what you think as well. You can find me and message me on LinkedIn. I can’t promise I’ll reply to you day and date, but I’ll do my best. Or you can email me directly at editor@theinterline.com rather than using an intermediary mailbox. I’ll do my best to reply to everyone. I promise I’ll read it and I promise I will try to get back to you. 

For now though, thanks for listening. I really don’t take you being part of this audience for granted. We’ve grown a lot in the limited time we’ve been doing this second season. It’s rewarding to do, but it’s doubly rewarding when I know that there’s such a diversity and such a seniority of people who listen to this show. 

For now though, thanks for listening again, and I’ll talk to you again really soon.

Ben is a senior fashion technology storyteller, analyst, and moderator with more than a decade's experience in retail.