"Blockchain is proving to be a major disruptive force in financial services," said Joe Guastella, a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP, and U.S. and global leader of the financial services practice. "The industry prototypes and pilots have shown this, and we continue to focus on helping our clients to make blockchain a reality for their businesses."

"These five blockchain companies are collaborating with Deloitte's teams not just in the U.S., but across key geographies as well. Each complements our deep industry experience and, together, we are harvesting the benefits of blockchain technologies — developing new revenue models, improving cost efficiencies and creating innovative solutions across the globe," said Guastella.

Deloitte's approach involves collaborating with its clients from idea stage through to the end commercialization, serving as the consultancy version of an incubator. As part of that process, Deloitte works with clients to rapidly build and test ideas, leveraging the latest solutions from its fintech ecosystem and integrating them into complex client environments. Overall, Deloitte brings a broad set of services including strategy, technology, talent, operations, risk, compliance, accounting and tax to transform these ideas into meaningful results.

Each blockchain company can contribute a distinct capability or technology to Deloitte's clients:

• BlockCypher is a cloud blockchain provider. It enables developers and enterprises to easily build reliable blockchain applications. BlockCypher's platform runs Ethereum, Bitcoin and custom private chains at-scale.
• Bloq provides enterprise grade blockchain solutions to leading companies worldwide. Deloitte and Bloq are working together to deliver blockchain-enabled technology designed to improve integrity and security, and reduce costs in the $1.1 trillion insurance industry.
• ConsenSys is a production studio building decentralized applications and various developer and end-user tools for blockchain ecosystems, focusing primarily on Ethereum. Deloitte and ConsenSys have joined forces with the common purpose of fundamentally transforming banking into true digital enterprises.
• Loyyal is a universal loyalty and rewards platform using blockchain and smart contract technology. It introduces interoperability to the currently fragmented industry, multi-branded coalitions, program liability management and dynamic issuance/redemption options customized for each unique relationship.
• Stellar.org connects financial institutions, payments systems, and people so that anyone can send money to anyone else quickly and reliably. The Stellar network is designed to reduce friction and fees for micropayments and remittances to make affordable financial services accessible to the world.

Guastella made the announcement of these agreements at CoinDesk's Consensus 2016 conference this morning.