Category

Finance

Dec 16
Love0

Examining DLT Solutions for Trade and Finance, with a China Focus

By Blog, Finance, Special Interest Group

2020 will be remembered as the year the world was impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, with severe health, economic and societal consequences for many. The lockdown experience many nations faced was a chance for some to rethink and reflect on the events that were changing the lives of billions of people. 

As a volunteer with both the Hyperledger Capital Markets and Trade Finance Special Interest Groups, I took this opportunity to research developments in Distributed Ledger Technology in China. After the turmoil of this pandemic, I believe a large-scale adoption of Distributed Ledger Technology is indeed possible and could lead to the development of ecosystems that will contribute to a better future for our society. 

I captured my research in a paper that highlights the efforts at the national level in China to embrace the integration of DLT into a comprehensive ecosystem that could potentially bring value for the world, focusing particularly on finance industry applications. Read on for some of the highlights from the paper:

China is building the first DLT interoperability project within a cross-cloud, cross-framework, cross-chain architecture over a number of smart cities in China and in strategic locations internationally. This project, called the Blockchain Service Network or BSN, aims to connect the different DLTs of public entities, private corporations and permissionless-permissioned chains.

The vision is to create a cross-industry DLT ecosystem that could be integrated by IoT and AI-powered smart cities to totally reshape data management practices and society.

Focusing on finance applications, China aims to complete the digitalization of assets and transactions for the digital transformation of financial markets. The People’s Bank of China is taking the lead by issuing technical and operational standards for the industry. It is currently running national pilot projects based on assets digitalization by the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), the so-called Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP), a solution that could potentially replace M0 “cash” in 10-15 years as a ground layer for financial operations.

The aim of the Hyperledger Capital Markets Special Interest Group (CMSIG) is to focus on the transformation of capital markets through the use of blockchain technologies, specifically the DLTs in the Hyperledger greenhouse. Hyperledger Fabric and its derivatives are core components of BSN. Capital markets are a way to connect investors and borrowers to facilitate the production of goods and services. Such markets are venues where creation of tradeable representations of assets of various duration and the safe exchange of these assets through the medium of a fungible, legal, safe asset like a currency takes place. Provenance and durable claims on the assets are important and so is interoperability between the assets through the medium of a safe currency. 

BSN and DCEP, by integrating a national digital marketplace, tackle friction inherent in these processes. The effects will be felt far beyond China. Non-China markets will have to use BSN and DCEP to engage with China markets. Reverberations from such a vast socio-technical transformation will reach even those who are not directly engaged with China. The Hyperledger CMSIG is following these developments and has hosted several presentations on BSN and DCEP. The paper on DLTs focusing on China is an important addition to the corpus, contributing to our understanding of China’s blockchain stack and its strategic implications for Trade Finance and Capital Markets. 

The People’s Bank of China is also leading a national project involving Distributed Ledger Technology for trade and supply chain finance, the national harmonization of account receivables, financial bill rediscount, tax filing and international trade information collection. The pilot project is working in strategic locations supported by special regulations and sandboxes applications. Key municipalities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, are developing long-term DLT strategic plans, integrating free trade areas with the goal to support a national pilot project application at a larger scale.

Trade and supply chain finance, especially in cross border operations, represents a perfect case scenario where BSN and DCEP, despite them being separate projects, could potentially find common ground for integration based on the high level of internationalization and the large number of players involved in transactions. International trade is a fragmented environment made up of banks, insurers, logistics and transportation operators, buyers and sellers: it may greatly benefit from inclusive projects like BSN and DCEP.

One of the areas the Hyperledger Trade Finance Special Interest Group (TFSIG) focuses on is technical and business operational practices for achieving interoperability and the creation of a comprehensive ecosystem between networks. Hyperledger Project Cactus could help achieve this higher purpose, standing as a turnkey solution for a new approach to “DLT-based ecosystem projects.”

To conclude, BSN could be seen as an institutional marketplace for DLT applications in different areas, where each solution will find its place and challenge each other for a new “network” of DLT cloud, framework and applications. In the long run, BSN can be considered a pivotal strategic architecture, capable of reaching businesses stretching from China to overseas strategic locations, under a secure and distributed network. Financial DLT national projects therefore represent a way to safely drive overseas investments in terms of political orientation and economic accountability over the Digital Silk Road.

For more details and updates, please see the full DLT solutions for trade and finance – China focus paper on the TFSIG and CMSIG wikis.

Trade Finance SIG: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/TFSIG/DLT+solutions+for+trade+and+finance+-+China+Focus

Capital Market SIG: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/CMSIG/DLT+solutions+for+trade+and+finance+-+China+focus 

Written by:
Eugenio Reggianini, Business Development Manager, CarbonBlue Innovations Limited; Member, Hyperledger Trade Finance & Capital Market Special Interest Groups

Curated  by:
Andrea Frosinini, freelance trade finance consultant; Chair, Hyperledger Trade Finance Special Interest Group   

Vipin Bharathan, Technical Strategist and Founder, dlt.nyc; Chair, Hyperledger Capital Markets SIG

Dec 03
Love0

An innovative blockchain solution powered by Hyperledger Fabric helps banks implement DeFI services in days

By Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Fabric

Digitization is a megatrend that has already transformed many industries – and now it’s banking’s turn. But digital banking is about more than just rebranding or adding a mobile app: it requires highly personalized transactions. In this sense, banks have a lot to learn from decentralized finance, or DeFI.

There are still lots of issues to solve before we can celebrate the coming of a new digital banking age:

  • Customers of even the same bank can’t directly interact with each other;
  • Cross-border transfers remain expensive and ridden with middlemen;
  • Bank users can’t convert fiat into crypto and back; and
  • New banking services take ages to develop, approve and introduce.

In DeFi, most of these problems have already been resolved. Users can lend each other money directly; earn more than 10% a year on crypto deposits; send money abroad in seconds, and much else. Banks could greatly benefit from these instruments. The problem is that developing a crypto-fiat DeFi platform from scratch is expensive and requires expertise that most banks’ IT teams simply don’t have. 

Introducing Cryptoenter: a turn-key DeFi solution for banks

The way to solve this conundrum is to implement a versatile DeFi infrastructure that any bank could use out of the box. That’s exactly what Cryptoenter does: it’s a ready-to-use platform that facilitates interactions between banks and their users – as well as between users themselves, wherever they are in the world. 

As soon as a financial institution integrates Cryptoenter, its customers gain access to dozens of DeFi services:

  • P2P lending (users issue each other loans in crypto and fiat);
  • Cryptocurrency/fiat wallet;
  • Fiat-crypto and crypto-fiat gateways;
  • Instant and cheap cross-border transfers (remittance fees don’t exceed $1);
  • Real-time value exchange;
  • Payment processing and acquiring;
  • Crowdfunding and a social network for investors;
  • Issuing stablecoins and new cryptocurrencies;
  • Interbank payments, and much else.

Essentially Cryptoenter provides a virtual banking front end and a ready system for managing customers’ fiat and crypto accounts. As long as two banks sign up as validators on Cryptoenter, their customers can interact with each other in the same way as customers of the same bank. For the financial institution, the benefits are many:

  • Extra revenue (charging fees on DeFi services);
  • Increased customer loyalty;
  • Expansion into new regions (branchless banking);
  • Easy customer acquisition.

Scalable and easy to implement

Thanks to a handy API, Cryptoenter is quick and easy to integrate into the backend and frontend of any bank. Every end customer gets a personal crypto-fiat wallet and can start using DeFi services immediately through the familiar interface. Meanwhile, the bank itself can focus on marketing instead of spending money on product development. 

To ensure scaling and speed, Cryptoenter leverages Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric – the first DeFi project to do so. The platform also uses Rubicon Blockchain by Smart Block Laboratory and a number of IBM solutions, including IBM Cloud, Kubernetes, and Cloud Object Storage.

The following diagram shows the interactions within the Cryptoenter infrastructure:

According to a recent report, banks spend 72% of their IT budget on maintaining existing systems. Cryptoenter allows any bank to implement a complete DeFi system for a fraction of that budget – and enjoy all the benefits of digital banking without any additional development. 

Sep 28
Love0

#HyperledgerFinTech: A sampling of production applications using Hyperledger technologies in the finance market

By Blog, Finance, Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha

The financial services market has long turned to technology to address a range of back-end challenges and enhance customer-facing services. Blockchain is increasingly becoming a go-to technology for advancing many different financial systems and solutions with different Hyperledger platforms serving as the core for an array of applications now in production. 

Read on for just a sampling #HyperledgerFinTech solutions, built using a mix of Hyperledger technologies:

Bakong

Sponsored by the National Bank of Cambodia, the country’s central bank, Bakong is the first retail payments system in the world using blockchain technology. Built on Hyperledger Iroha, Bakong delivers value for customers, merchants and banks. Individuals can now transfer money and buy from merchants with a simple smartphone app. Merchants gain a fast, cashless, and secure payments system. And banks can do interbank transfers at much lower cost.

Bakong was developed by Soramitsu and, after a soft launch in 2019, is now expanding with 16 financial institutions using the system and more expected to join in the near future. The project was also designed to promote financial inclusion for the country’s large number of unbanked citizens. Any citizen of the country can open a Bakong account, even if they don’t have a traditional bank account. The more than 500 merchants that accept Bakong can be viewed in a map inside the app. 

daura 

Built atop the private Swiss Trust Chain run by Swisscom and Swiss Post and powered by Hyperledger Fabric, daura is a digital share platform for financing and investing in Swiss SMEs. With daura, the share register is easily digitized and capital increases are carried out quickly and inexpensively at the push of a button. Shares can be split into any number of small lots and the share register is always digitally maintained, complete and up-to-date. With daura, companies have also transitioned virtual Annual General Meetings as a response to COVID-19 with authorization and access are granted directly via the blockchain. 

ioCash

ioBuilders is a blockchain technology company focused on building regulated fintech and enterprise solutions based on distributed ledger technology to help businesses succeed in their blockchain adoption. The company offers professional services, including technical, business and regulatory, and develops its own product line. ioBuilders has been one of the first adopters and advocates of Hyperledger Besu, providing essential feedback to improve its enterprise requirements capabilities. 

ioCash, one of ioBuilder’s core products, is a fintech platform enabling the use of regulated fiat money on blockchain networks, making it programmable with smart contracts and able to interact with other blockchain use cases. ioCash’s platform operates under an electronic money licence, providing accounts (with or without IBAN) and complex payments functionalities through API and smart contracts connectivity. ioCash is also available as a technology license for financial institutions that hold banking or electronic money licences and are aiming to add the benefits of blockchain into their payment systems. 

Memberpass

CULedger, a credit union service organization (CUSO) that began when a group of credit unions came together in 2016 as a direct response to the increasing threat of fraud, set out to bring a decentralized identity solution product for credit unions to market. The result was MemberPass, a permanent, portable digital identity credential for credit union members.

Built in partnership with Evernym and using Hyperledger Indy, Memberpass replaces vulnerable authentication processes such as common knowledge-based questions. Now credit unions are able to issue a digital credential to members, giving them a hassle-free way to control and prove their identity quickly and easily while protecting their personal information.  

Verified.Me 

Verified.Me offers a secure and convenient way to help Canadians verify their identities.

Verified.Me is a service offered by SecureKey Technologies Inc. The Verified.Me service was developed in cooperation with seven of Canada’s major financial institutions – BMO, CIBC, Desjardins, National Bank of Canada, RBC, Scotiabank and TD. The Verified.Me network continues to evolve adding new identity providers and service providers to make your life easier.

Verified.Me is built on top of the IBM Blockchain Platform which is based on Linux Foundation’s open source Hyperledger Fabric v1.2, and will be interoperable with Hyperledger Indy projects. 

Users of the Verified.Me mobile app or web browser experience are able to get a free credit score with Equifax, register with Sun Life, verify their identity when registering for Dynacare Plus, an online and mobile service that lets users manage their health remotely, and more.

Join the conversation about solutions and applications in the financial service market with #HyperledgerFinTech this month on social channels. Or get involved with the Capital Markets or Trade Finance Special Interest Groups.

If you are interested in peer-to-peer transactions, mark your calendar for a webinar hosted by CoinDesk at 11:00 am ET on October 20th. A panel of experts on different Hyperledger platforms will be discussing “Governance, standards and interoperability: Getting past the roadblocks to peer-to-peer financial transactions.” Go here to find out more.

Jun 29
Love6

The New York Times Recognizes Brian Behlendorf as one of the Top 10 Most Influential People in Blockchain

By Blog, Finance, Healthcare

We’re thrilled to see Nathaniel Popper of The New York Times include Brian Behlendorf, Hyperledger Executive Director, in a roundup of the top 10 most influential leaders advancing blockchain technologies in the industry today.

Brian has led a life-long career in open source technology starting off as a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet, and a founding member of the Apache Software Foundation. Often referring to himself as the “Geek Diplomat” of Hyperledger, Brian has successfully led the effort to attract more than 235 members from all over the world, pulled in hundreds of developers to contribute code and grown the consortium to include 10 tools and frameworks over the past two years. All this has made Hyperledger the fastest growing open source project hosted by The Linux Foundation to date.

Laura Shin wrote another story in The New York Times, that explored how various industries like healthcare, government, food, supply chain management and trade finance are turning to blockchain to improve efficiencies and enable new business models. Brian Behlendorf is quoted in the article saying companies must transform and adapt their business models to leverage blockchain if they want to remain competitive.

The technology, he said, “does force them to transform in the same way that companies that were information-centered have had to transform with the rise of the internet. That same kind of thing will hit any company about transactions or about being a system of record for an industry. If they transform themselves before their competitors do it, they’ll have a future.”

The article referenced Northern Trust as an example of blockchain in production today. Northern Trust utilizes Hyperledger Fabric to automate the paper-intensive process of investing by pensions and endowments in private equity.  Hyperledger technologies run in production deployments and provide real value beyond finance as well. Take for instance, PokitDok, which created a Hyperledger Sawtooth-powered platform called DokChain that manages smart contracts, resolves patient identities, controls access to personal health records, settles healthcare claims and fuels complex medical supply chains.

Another example is Change Healthcare, which last year, signed on as the first healthcare Premier member of Hyperledger. They announced their Intelligent Healthcare Network, built on Hyperledger Fabric, for claims management transparency. With it, organizations can accurately track, in real time, the status of claims submission and remittance across the complete claim.

The fact is companies from small startups to large prominent tech companies are betting a chunk of their business on the future of these technologies. SAP, Oracle, GE, Amazon and Huawei announced Blockchain-as-a-Service products within the last year, all powered by Hyperledger technologies. We, at Hyperledger, proudly support this innovation.

Hyperledger’s end vision is to create the foundational infrastructure that will power enterprise distributed ledger applications and systems and allow for decentralization. And the future is looking very bright! You can check out many other projects, pilots and production deployments of Hyperledger (or add your own) via our Blockchain Showcase. You can also plug into the Hyperledger community at github, Rocket.Chat the wiki or our mailing list. As always, keep up with what’s new with Hyperledger on Twitter.

 

May 16
Love12

Hyperledger Adds Deutsche Bank as Premier Member

By Announcements, Finance

Leading global financial services provider joins open blockchain consortium to drive innovative solutions for customers

SAN FRANCISCO – May 16, 2018 – Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry business blockchain technologies, announced today that Deutsche Bank has joined the project as a Premier member. Other Hyperledger Premier members include: Accenture, Airbus, American Express, Baidu, Change Healthcare, Cisco, Daimler, Digital Asset, DTCC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, J.P. Morgan, NEC, SAP, Tradeshift and Wanda FFan Technology.

“Adding a major bank like Deutsche Bank to our list of Premier members demonstrates the value Hyperledger brings to the financial services market,” said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger. “With their help and global reach, we look forwarding to driving more global production deployments like Know Your Customer (KYC), payments, trading and others based on Hyperledger technologies.”

Hyperledger aims to enable organizations to build robust, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support their individual business transactions by creating enterprise-grade, open source distributed ledger frameworks and code bases. It is a global collaboration of more than 230 organizations including leaders in finance, banking, IoT, supply chain, manufacturing and technology.

“As a Premier member, we’re hoping our expertise and global network will help advance open source distributed ledger technologies and allow us to better serve the complex needs of our clients, who look to us to improve their and their trade partners’ financial endeavors,” said Jon Pearson, Head of Deutsche Bank Labs United Kingdom and Ireland.

To see a full list of member companies, visit: https://www.hyperledger.org/about/members. If you’re interested in joining Hyperledger as a member company, please visit: https://www.hyperledger.org/about/join

About Hyperledger

Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration including leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing and Technology. The Linux Foundation hosts Hyperledger under the foundation. To learn more, visit: https://www.hyperledger.org/.

 

 

May 31
Love9

Consensus 2017 is a Wrap!

By Events, Finance, Healthcare, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Cello, Hyperledger Composer, Hyperledger Explorer, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth

The Hyperledger team (and 40 of our members!) spent a good amount of time in New York for CoinDesk’s annual Consensus conference last week. It was a great event with tons of excitement and enthusiasm around blockchain and its many applications. Attendees were from all walks of life – from developers to architects to financial services professionals to healthcare specialists to investors – all trying to better understand the best and most practical use cases of the technology.
The event kicked off the weekend before with the Building Blocks Hackathon at 30 Rockefeller where many of the world’s top blockchain developers vied to build the next killer smart contract app. Participants could build on top of any blockchain protocol: bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger or otherwise. And through various sponsor challenges, they were encouraged to leverage the software and support made available by our world-class mentors in order to deliver projects.

Hyperledger was a sponsor of the event. The Hashed Health development team ended up winning the Hyperledger challenge, which was to create a game using any of the Hyperledger frameworks. 

(Winning team of the Hyperledger hackathon challenge and Hyperledger Executive Director, Brian Behlendorf)

Jonathan Levi, an active Hyperledger community member and the founder of HACERA, won 2 hackathon challenges using Hyperledger technology. They won the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance challenge and they were one of the winners of the Microsoft challenge. They called their solution Dutchess – a secure decentralized Chess on the blockchain that allows players to use ETH to pay for an unfair advantage in a sealed-bid Dutch auction. The entry highlighted Jonathan’s and HACERA’s approach of integrating multiple permissioned & public chains.

Dutchess incorporated:

  • Public Ethereum accounts used to transfer money to a sealed-bid Dutch auction
  • Confidential transactions using Solidity on Quorum, deployed on Microsoft Azure
  • A permissioned and public identity chain (Sovrin) for registering identity tokens
  • Hyperledger Indy for implementing secure verifiable claims
  • Hyperledger Sawtooth for transaction processing and validation

The result was a mini HACERA-like workflow that provided secure, auditable, privacy preserving, that prevents impersonation, relying on self-sovereign identity and offers a non-repudiation guarantee – with a playable fun game of Chess on a blockchain.

Early Monday, the Hyperledger team then set up shop on the 6th floor of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. Crowds of attendees stopped by each day to learn more about the technology.  

 

At the booth several member companies gave demos on different Hyperledger projects including Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Iroha. Cloudsoft demonstrated Deploying Hyperledger Fabric on Kubernetes with Cloudsoft AMP. IBM showed Connect a Cloud, connecting organizations together on Hyperledger Fabric using hosted cloud providers of choice. Soramitsu ran a KYC/user identity demo of Hyperledger Iroha/Android app and video, and Byacco, a local digital currency currently in use at University of Aizu in Fukushima, Japan. IntellectEU together with their customer Telindus (Proximus Group) explained streamlined asset transactions through reconciliation, matching and resolution among multiple parties.

Hyperledger also hosted a Roundtable on Monday on its distributed ledger technologies, Hyperledger Sawtooth and Hyperledger Iroha, each technology had end users speak to their different use cases. Kelly Olsen from Intel spoke to Sawtooth and his user, Pokitdok CTO, Ted Tanner weighed in on how they are utilizing Sawtooth in their healthcare blockchain solution. Makoto Takemiya, CEO, co-founder, Soramitsu discussed Hyperledger Iroha as a blockchain framework for mobile applications and Soichiro Takagi, from the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), International University of Japan shared his experience with the technology.

(Hyperledger roundtable participants: Makoto Takemiya, Soichiro Takagi, Kelly Olsen & Ted Tanner)

In addition to the robust line-up of Hyperledger activities in the main Consensus program and on the show floor, Hyperledger hosted a series of talks that ran all day Monday and Tuesday in the Hyperledger Mini Summit room. Attendees interested in how to best collaborate and get involved in the Hyperledger initiatives and learn where they can provide the most value had their bases covered in Monday’s “Meet the Hyperledger community” sessions. Speakers included the new technical staff, and diverse representation from the Technical Steering and Marketing committees, Governing Board, Identity Working Group and our fearless leader, Brian Behlendorf, Hyperledger’s executive director.

In Tuesday’s Hyperledger Mini Summit sessions, members dove a bit deeper into the impact of blockchain technologies on their businesses with field reports on how they are using Hyperledger to solve their business objectives. Attendees heard technical insights from Norbloc on the KYC process, IntellectEU together with their customer Telindus (Proximus Group) on streamlined asset transactions, as well as Cloudsoft on deploying and managing global blockchain networks.

Our members reinforced that blockchain is not only impacting business on a global scale, but also across industries through blockchain talks from Huawei on telecom, Daimler on the industrial enterprise, Deloitte on regulation, Energy Blockchain Labs on reversing China carbon emissions, and a panel of speakers from Accenture, BanQu and Leading Directions on blockchain for good applications.

Hyperledger hosted three different panels on Tuesday moderated by Executive Director, Brian Behlendorf and Security Maven, Dave Huseby. Those panels were “The Role of Open Source in Blockchain,” “Blockchain in the Wild, PoCs, Pilots & Deployments” and “Security, Privacy and the Enterprise Blockchain.”

(The Role of Open Source in Blockchain panelists: Dan Middleton, Intel, Casey Kuhlman, Monax, Makoto Takemiya, Soramitsu & Amber Baldet, J.P. Morgan)

 

(Blockchain in the Wild, PoCs, Pilots & Deployments panelists: Jesse Chenard, MonetaGo, Ashwin Kumar, Deutsche Boerse, Ram Komarraju, CLS Group, Corey Todaro, Hashed Health & David Treat, Accenture)

The panels were very well attended and there was great discussion on all three topics. It was most interesting that identity on the blockchain turned out to be the main topic of conversation during the security and privacy panel. And on that note, we’re excited with Hyperledger Indy just recently getting accepted into incubation under Hyperledger. Indy provides tools, libraries, and reusable components for providing digital identities rooted on blockchains.

(Security, Privacy and the Enterprise Blockchain panelists: Justin Newton, Netki, Drummond Reed, Sovrin Foundation, Jeff Garzik, Bloq & Astyanax Kanakakis, Norbloc)

We ended Consensus with a member party atop a NYC hotel rooftop. It was such a pleasure to see everyone and we are extremely grateful for all the support our community has provided around this event and overall. We’re looking forward to next year’s event – we hope that you can join us!
For those interested in additional information about Hyperledger technologies please reach out to: info@hyperledger.org. As always, we encourage developers to join our efforts via GitHub, Rocket.Chat the wiki or the mailing lists. You can also follow Hyperledger on Twitter.

Apr 27
Love10

[VIDEO] Hyperledger Interviews Amber Baldet, JP Morgan

By Blog, Finance

We recently sat down with Amber Baldet, blockchain program lead at JP Morgan. JP Morgan is one of the Premier founding members of Hyperledger.

JP Morgan is a big supporter of open source software and was thrilled to see a community coming together around open source standard setting for blockchain and DLT. Last year, they announced work on Quorum, a privacy preserving version of Ethereum via Hyperledger’s TSC.

JP Morgan is currently exploring blockchain to discover ways of doing more complex asset transfer, while maintaining security and understanding the concept of value. Amber looks forward to seeing how their work on Quorum can be additive to the overall Hyperledger community. According to her, Blockchain tech is transformative to the financial services industry and as the largest investment bank in the world, JP Morgan is committed to shaping the future of the technology.

Watch the full interview below:

Mar 31
Love3

Indian Bank removing friction in business transactions using blockchain technology

By Blog, Finance

Guest post: Rajendra Mhalsekar, President, Head, Corporate Banking Technology, YES Bank  

Blockchain technology is poised to disrupt nearly every industry from key players to core functions – and the banking and financial markets industry is at the forefront. In a recent IBM IBV Study, 15 percent of banks and 14 percent of financial market institutions said that they intend to implement full-scale, commercial blockchain solutions in 2017. Mass adoption isn’t that far off either, with roughly 65 percent of banks expecting to have blockchain solutions in production in the next three years.

India’s fifth largest private bank, YES BANK, is among the first wave of institutions around the world to publicly announce innovation in payments using blockchain and cognitive technologies. Collaborating with IBM in 2015, it was the first bank in India to have launched API Banking services, which is a technology protocol allowing one access to the bank’s transaction processing services from an ERP environment in a secure manner.

Making use of blockchain technology

By capitalizing on the efficiency and security features of blockchain, YES BANK has used Hyperledger Fabric to design an innovative supply chain financing solution. It will aim to reduce the turn-around-time for an invoice to payment cycle from the current 60 days to near rapid real-time processing. This will help recognize enhanced efficiencies in terms of cost as well as resources.

Using the Hyperledger Fabric 0.6, YES BANK is working to implement a permissioned blockchain network. This means that each node, or network participant, is required to prove its identity as a member of the network, thereby helping banks to maintain transaction anonymity on the shared ledger while retaining confidentiality of the contract between business users.

Helping resolve YES BANK’s payment challenge

The blockchain solution helps YES BANK resolve complex vendor payment issues. For instance, the bank’s vendor financing solution allows its client Bajaj Electricals to digitize the process for the discounting and disbursing of funds to its vendors by seamlessly integrating with the bank’s systems. The integration of both upstream and downstream systems offering automated processing of transactions greatly reduces the need for manual intervention with the help of YES BANK’s API Banking.

Governing these transactions, the business logic and rules are now captured in a specifically designed “smart contract” chain code. Furthermore, implementation uses a superior Cryptokey, which offers state-of-the-art security for both documents and transactions on the Blockchain. Therefore, YES BANK helps ensure the Financial Supply Chain is more robust, secure and seamless, offering a great customer experience and making a significant impact on the overall Global Transaction Banking space.

Blockchain aims for transparency

Blockchain technology ensures maximum transparency because of its structure, which does not allow for data to be altered by any one party, and works in append-only mode (meaning that records can only be added, not deleted or changed further back on the chain). This allows banks to more accurately track customer payment histories, across borders and banks, reducing the risk of defaulters.

With the recent focus on the financial industry where fintechs and banks are collaborating to make user experience more positive, the transparency in the system will go a long way to transform transactions.

A key consideration with the advent of blockchain technology in business is the regulatory climate. In India, government regulators are already beginning to embrace this technology, and the Reserve Bank of India acknowledged that blockchain has potential to transform India’s financial markets especially because of its inherent security and ability to combat counterfeiting.

Looking forward

YES BANK is aiming to have a transparent decentralized ledger wherein the bank and its customers are aware of every block of information updated, thereby reducing discrepancies between the bank, its end users and vendors, allowing “auditability with accountability” for all. With blockchain technology helping to remove much of the friction in business transactions, it can be instrumental in transforming processes to ensure a better experience for all involved in its network.

Mar 24
Love2

(3.24.17) S&P Global: The week in fintech: Bringing blockchain from theory to practice

By Finance, News

Companies involved in blockchain projects are introducing practical implementations of the technology, and financial institutions are among those interested in how they can use distributed ledger technology.

IBM Corp. recently rolled out a service called IBM Blockchain that lets businesses build applications on its cloud with code from the Hyperledger Project, a cross-industry blockchain project. Along with IBM, some of the Hyperledger’s premier members include financial institutions like American Express Co., CME Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. The organization is actively tracking proofs of concept in the financial industry.

More here.

Mar 20
Love1

(3.20.17) American Banker: Banks pick IBM blockchain to expand digital ID project in Canada

By Finance, News

Canadian banks will use blockchain technology to manage consumers’ digital identities.

The banks bought into the idea of managing digital identities for consumers five years ago. Initially, they focused on authentication: letting customers maintain one user name and password for multiple websites, mainly bank and government sites. The Concierge system, managed by SecureKey, was a way to simplify customers’ lives. The system stores 7 million Canadian consumers’ credentials currently with 250,000 added each month.

More here.