At a media lunch earlier this week, hosted by several senior industry sector leaders from technology consultancy firm Capgemini, the talk soon turned to the subject of "fintechs".Philip Gomm, industry practice lead for Capgemini's financial services business, suggested that the role of consulting firms such as his was evolving to take account of small specialist technology players and assess how they fitted with the requirements of large firms (such as banks and other large financial services providers)."Our challenge, as an organisation, is also to embrace that agility and recognise the opportunities," he said. "For us, 'disruption' has a technology-based influence, not just in terms of the digital front end but also in getting back office, and efficiencies in the business process."In this frame of mind, Gomm was very keen to push the claims of Ripple as the next big idea - and not just its use of blockchain technology to create a "distributed ledger," but the way it has reinvented itself as a vendor of services to banks, not trying to become a disruptive payments competitor.Ripple has picked two ways to prove its worth."One is in foreign remittances, where blockchain can facilitate the transfer between two correspondent banks who know each other and their customers; this meets all AML and KYC drivers," Gomm said. "And the other is presenting Ripple as a solution which allows the banks to provide liquidity between partners trading in a particular commodity - be it equity or currency."Using the blockchain 'out-of-the-box' solution adds security as it creates an immediate transaction where all of the participants agree how it will operate, and how it it will execute - and it executes the transaction at the same time [for all those involved].""If it doesn't execute the way it was anticipated, all steps are reversed - all done in real time. So it gives you an  immediacy of that transaction without the requirement for trust between any of the partners."This is because the block chain technology precludes anyone from altering the transaction mid-flight, Gomm noted.