BNY Mellon "To me, network effect is the key."
So says Saket Sharma, CIO of New York-based financial services firm BNY Mellon’s Treasury Services unit, as he outlined the bank’s approach to adopting the technology that underlies bitcoin.
Last week, BNY Mellon hosted a day of seminars focused on the blockchain. The event , which drew a small but engaged crowd of BNY employees, followed months of internal development and experimentation that saw the bank pilot its own digital currency and, later, joining a consortium of financial institutions looking to implement the technology.
In an interview, Sharma argued that collaboration among banks, particularly when it comes to establishing standards of use, will be the driving factor as to whether financial companies begin using blockchains for their services.
He told CoinDesk: "I can come up with a solution that’s great, but [it doesn’t matter] if I don’t have a network effect – and that’s where I think it’s a combination of the financial industry coming together that will really make this a viable thing if this technology picks up.” Sharma said that all of the business lines within BNY Mellon are looking at possible blockchain applications, but cautioned that the bank sees regulatory and legal questions as an impediment to adoption.
"I think there’s a lot of potential with this technology, and our goal is to really capitalize on the talent in the bank, working collaboratively with others, and play a bigger role in the opportunities there," he said. Educational focus
According to Sharma, BNY Mellon began to look into the technology by testing bitcoin and, later, its own kind of digital currency.
"We started with the bitcoin," he said. "We downloaded Bitcoin Core, we modified it, we actually ran it on an internal private cloud,” he said.These days, Sharma continued, business units within the bank […]
