Use cases for Financial Services Blockchain that are "ready to go"
Lots of talk , lots of prototyping, lots of hot air - where is the meat? IMHO It is only when Blockchain goes live in real markets with real transactions that it will gain the professional credibility it deserves - here are a few of the candidates vying to be in the leading pack.
Here is a list of Heavy weight Blockchain orientated projects ( predominately Financial services orientated) that seem close to " about to happen" .....none as far as I am aware are actually live but they could be shortly......It's not meant to a complete list folks - more illustrative of the way the game seemed to be playing out ..If there are other projects around that you feel should be added to the list please advise below and we will add them
1- Trade Finance : Digital Trade Chain
"IBM won the contract to provide the cloud-based platform in a competitive bidding process. It will address the challenge of managing, tracking and securing domestic and international trade transactions by connecting all parties both online and via mobile devices.
“To make the Digital Trade Chain network a reality and enable it to serve potentially thousands of the consortium’s banking clients, we turned to IBM in enterprise blockchain to help us quickly bring this highly scalable system into production,” says Rudi Peeters, CIO, KBC on behalf of the Consortium. “Their blockchain and banking industry expertise will help us create a new platform for small and medium businesses in Europe that can enable them for faster, easier and cheaper trade transactions.”
The DTC network will be built on Hyperledger Fabric v1.0.0 and is expected to go into production by end of 2017. "
2- Private equity - Northern Trust
NEW YORK, Feb 22 (Reuters) - Northern Trust Corp has deployed a new blockchain-based system built with International Business Machines Corp to record information on transactions involving private equity funds, in one of the first commercial deployments of the nascent technology.
The program is currently being used to manage the administration of a private equity fund run by Switzerland-based asset manager Unigestion, Northern Trust and IBM said on Wednesday.
The new blockchain system records documents and information connected to transactions involving the fund, such as investments by limited partners, a process which is currently highly manual. Other than providing a central record for fund managers, investors and administrators, the program also allows regulators to access the information when required.
More here https://goo.gl/SYFiMJ
3- Gold - Royal mint Gold CME Group
The Royal Mint, the world's leading export mint, and CME Group, the world's leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace, today announced a collaboration to transform the way that market participants can trade gold.
The Royal Mint, a 1,000-year-old institution owned by HM Treasury, has partnered with CME Group to build and launch a digitised gold offering called Royal Mint Gold (RMG). RMG will change the way traders and investors trade, execute and settle gold.
The innovative new product, launching in 2017, will see The Royal Mint issue RMG as a digital record of ownership for gold stored at its highly-secure on-site bullion vault storage facility. CME Group will develop, implement and operate the product’s digital trading platform. Taken together, this new service will provide an easier, cost-effective and cryptographically secure alternative to buying, holding and trading spot gold.
Commenting on the announcement, Vin Wijeratne, CFO of The Royal Mint, said “The Royal Mint has a unique history and a trusted reputation earned over many centuries trading in gold but until now, there hasn’t been a way to digitally trade physical gold.”
“Developing a trading platform with CME Group will satisfy customer demands for faster, cost effective and secure ways to buy, hold and sell gold and complement our existing products. This landmark partnership allows us to combine the world’s leading mint, the best futures trading platform globally and best in class technology.”
4- Land registry - England ( Sweden and Brazil are also initiating similar schemes)
HM Land Registry plans to live test a ‘Digital Street’ scheme which will enable the “almost instant” transfer of property ownership, backed by technology including blockchain – the secure distributed ledger underpinning the Bitcoin currency – it has emerged
Matthew Pennington of legal software developer Tonic Works said: “We welcome the news that Land Registry will be trialling blockchain tech as part of their Digital Street project.
“Using blockchain will help Land Registry achieve its goal of becoming the world’s leading land registry for speed, simplicity, and an open approach to data, as well as save taxpayers money by doing away with paper contracts and reducing instances of fraud.”
5- Central bank settlements - Bank of England
The Bank of England has paired up with artificial intelligence and blockchain specialists in a bid to keep up to date with the fast-growing financial technology sector.
The central bank is testing an artificial intelligence system with Canadian startup MindBridge AI to allow it to spot abnormalities in financial transactions and "explore the benefit of machine learning technology for analysing the quality of regulatory data input."
It has also partnered with San Francisco-based startup Ripple, which opened an office in London last year, to trial a blockchain-based technology that would make cross-border payments and the movement of currencies more immediate. Blockchain is the technology which underpins crypto-currencies like bitcoin.
The Bank said that its aim with Ripple is to "show how this kind of synchronisation might lower settlement risk and improve the speed and efficiency of cross-border payments."
One fintech chief executive said that this was a key issue for a number of consumers in Britain, adding that it would currently be "quicker to fly a large transfer of money over from the US than to transfer it."
What next? In researching this article I came across this posting which provides a decision tree on whether block chain is likely to work in a given business situation - I will love to look back at this infographic in 5 years from and see whether it was right..for those that lived through the last disruptive force - The Internet - we all know how wrong some of these predictions can be!
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