IBM, a global technology company that provides hardware, in partnership with CLS, a foreign exchange market infrastructure firm, have launched a blockchain platform aimed at the financial services industry.
The platform, called LedgerConnect, will help financial institutions to use blockchain in a number of areas, including know-your-customer processes, sanctions screening, collateral management, derivatives post-trade processing and reconciliation and market data. IBM’s LedgerConnect platform aims to be a one-stop shop for financial institutions to create blockchain apps. Currently, 9 financial services companies, including banks Barclays and Citi, are involved in the proof of concept.
The blockchain, or distributed ledger technology (DLT), being employed by large companies, however, differs from the bitcoin network. Whereas the bitcoin blockchain is public, the DLT being applied at large organizations is private.
Supporters of blockchain technology claim that it can speed up processes within the financial industry, making them more efficient and cheaper. But wide-scale adoption of blockchain technology hasn’t happened yet. Instead, many financial institutions are experimenting with Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and it’s unclear how it might be implemented across industries.
