State Bank of India enters crypto-currencies’ field with ‘Bankchain’
After Bitcoin, blockchain, State Bank of India enters crypto-currencies’ field with ‘Bankchain’
After RBI’s
research arm Institute for Development and Research in Banking
Technology put out a paper last month in favour of blockchain
technology—the technology behind crypto-currencies like Bitcoin—State
Bank of India has decided to enter the field. According to The Economic
Times, SBI, along with IBM, Microsoft,
Skylark, KPMG and 10 commercial banks, may soon be rolling out a
technology called Bankchain, to share information amongst banks which
would eventually help tackle frauds and streamline the lending process.
As a result, banks will be able to share information and decide whether
they wish to lend to certain entities. In the case of trade finance,
which would be one of the first applications, it would tackle instances
wherein a merchant discounts bills showing the same invoice to different
banks. Although SBI won’t be the first one to enter the domain—ICICI,
Yes and Axis are also working on this—what makes this initiative special
is that there are various lenders who are going to be on the same
platform. While blockchain was quite the rage internationally some years
ago, the pace of work on it slowed once those in the original
consortium—which included Goldman Sachs—left to work on their individual
versions of it.
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