Technology

How Will the Metaverse Change Finance and Accounting?

Dijam Panigrahi, co-founder/COO of Grid Raster, discusses the business problems the metaverse will present and solve in the future.

Olivia Berkman: What would you say are some of the business problems that the metaverse solves, specifically in finance and accounting?

Dijam Panigrahi: What we see is the ability to take a problem in the physical space, like the industrial shop floor. I want to do experiments with them, I want to try different what-if conditions, and see if I change a certain part or a component within that, how things will vary. All that simulation that we used to do in a 2D environment using MATLAB, now we have the ability to create a digital twin of that whole physical environment, which is like creating a soft copy of the real world.

The moment you are able to create that soft copy, which can behaviorally behave the way the physical world would have behaved, now you apply all the software techniques on it to analyze it, to create the worker conditions, and take the insights from there, and take it and apply in the physical world.

Berkman: As you see it, are there any problems that the metaverse presents when it comes to business? Any slippery slopes?

Panigrahi: A technology is always a dual-edged sword. It's all about how are you going to use it? With the metaverse, the camera will be capturing everything around you. There are obviously concerns about the privacy.

Since you are capturing everything around you, the privacy concerns become even greater than what was there with the internet. Maybe there's some data in your internet that was private, but now pretty much you can see your everyday activities.

Berkman: Is this something that's being talked about and taught in business schools or finance and accounting programs at this point?

Panigrahi: I think in the last six months, the moment Facebook rebranded themselves as Meta, I think the conversation has changed a lot.

A couple of universities already having tailored programs for augmented reality, virtual reality, and metaverse. That's beginning to happen.

Considering that, if you see some of the estimates as to what the market size would look like. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley estimated that the economy in the metaverse is going to be around $8 trillion. If it is going to be that size, everybody is in the conversation. More so on the finance side. There's a lot of ownership, the business models, and all that, new models that are going to be created, the ownership of the virtual assets. Everything that you see in the physical world, the real estate, attire. It's going to be traded. It's going to be purchased. It’s going to be acquired. All that will be part of the metaverse.

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