Global banks are testing blockchain with tech giants. Photo: Choice
Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Macquarie Bank, National Australia Bank and Westpac Banking Corp are part of a group of 40 global banks that have used different distributed ledger technology to simulate trading of commercial paper.
The trial suggests big banks around the world are moving forward at pace to build blockchains.
This new technology could be used for a range of banking operations, from transferring payments to financing trade.
The technology that underpins bitcoin – a distributed ledger that creates trust, allowing intermediaries to be removed from transaction systems – now promises to slash costs and speed up transaction times for banks.
On Thursday, R3 CEV, a group running a series of banking trials of block chain, said the Australian banks were part of a global group that had executed "smart contracts" on five block chains.
The smart contracts "were programmed to facilitate issuance, secondary trading and redemption of commercial paper", a short-term fixed-income security used for corporate funding, R3 said.
It is understood the banks are seeking to learn which global technology players have the best products for building blockchains in the cloud across a variety of commercial banking applications. Global tech giants Multiple cloud technology providers were involved in the latest fixed-income test, R3 said on Thursday.The private distributed ledger technologies were built by Chain, Eris Industries, Ethereum, IBM and Intel. The cloud computing resources that hosted the distributed ledgers were provided by Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud and Amazon AWS. ANZ Banking Group, which this week appointed Google Australia boss Maile Carnegie as its new group executive for digital banking, was not part of the R3 trial.But ANZ is working with Digital Asset Holdings, the start-up being run by former JPMorgan executive Blythe Masters , which ASX took a stake in earlier […]
