“It’s quite an effort.”
So says Mark Buitenhek, global head of transaction services for Dutch banking and financial services group ING .
In a new interview, Buitenhek told CoinDesk that the Amsterdam-based bank is pushing forward with a broad-reaching initiative to explore blockchain technology – a process that includes working with a global group of banks, as well as conducting in-house experimentation across a range of departments.
ING was among a group of five banks that announced in November that they were joining the global banking consortium headed up by startup R3 CEV.
Buitenhek said: “All our business lines are involved here. The transaction services organization which I am heading for ING globally, our financial markets, our lending services department is involved. There are people from IT involved, people from operations, client coverage staff.” According to Buitenhek, the bank sees the potential for blockchain applications in a variety of banking and finance contexts, including securities and trade settlement, internal transacting, e-identity and also as a backbone for connected devices.
“We do see the potential – we don’t know if it’s going to work. But if it’s going to work, it’s going to be big. That’s why we want to invest time, effort and money now,” he said. Staff-led initiative
Buitenhek said that one of the driving forces behinds the bank’s efforts to explore bitcoin and the blockchain that underlies it is the fact that a large number of its staff had already been experimenting with the technology on their own initiative.
“Two years ago – somewhere in 2013 – we started to look at this. We found out that over 100 of our IT staff were playing with applications of blockchain, including bitcoin. We didn’t even know about it.”The process of looking at the technology, he said, is now very much a “bottom-up” process and […]
