Many people I have talked to, mention "securities settlement" as an area suitable for lots of cost savings through the adoption of blockchain. But as we know, settlement is an area that does have a lot of intermediaries such as brokers/ custodians/ etc.
Question is - given the peer to peer nature of blockchain, will all the intermediaries in today's financial world get disintermediated? After all, banks are also intermediaries in some sense - if you look at them as custodians of your cash who give you access to a suite of financial services for parking your cash with them.
http://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=12193
