SAP is venturing into blockchain technology applications. The German multinational company, a market leader in enterprise application software and a legend in the enterprise computing world, announced that it collaborated with digital fintech company Ripple and two banks, ATB Financial in Canada and ReiseBank in Germany, to demonstrate how banks can improve the efficiency of cross-border payments by using blockchain technology.
Working with a team at ATB Financial, SAP and Ripple designed and built a proof-of-concept prototype based on blockchain technology. The prototype was used to send a test CAD $1,000 payment from ATB Financial to ReiseBank. According to the SAP press release, the payment, which would typically have taken between two to six business days to process because of requirements such as settling with the counterparty bank and reconciling accounts, was completed in around 20 seconds.
Using blockchain technology for efficient, fast and cheap cross-border payments is nothing new. What is interesting here is the involvement of SAP. With 78,000 employees, 310,000 corporate customers worldwide and a 2015 annual revenue of €20.8 billion, the company is the world’s third largest independent software manufacturer based on market capitalization. SAP has long been considered the embodiment of German quality and solid, no-nonsense enterprise computing for large firms.
“ATB stepped up as a relatively early adopter of digital in the banking world,” Kris Hansen, senior principal, industry value engineering – financial services, SAP Canada, told Bitcoin Magazine . “By 2011 the bank had already moved from legacy systems to a digital core. This paved the way for a level of speed and innovation less forward-thinking banks could only dream of. The blockchain demo is the latest example of how that early investment is paying off, and how ATB is prepared for a future led by digital forces. It’s also evidence of what digitally-ready banks […]
