The technology used in Bitcoin - Blockchain/Distributed Ledger Technology - has had a bad press with all the absurd things happening in crypto-currencies, e.g. prices soaring and dropping daily, being a major contributor to climate change due to the massive computing resources required to ‘mine’ new coins. But the underlying technology is basically sound with many DLT projects being developed worldwide, as the following examples show. One common feature of the blockchain solutions is one leading party sets up the DLT infrastructure and then other parties develop interfaces and services that link to it.

Visa B2B Connect service

Visa in 2016 teamed up with blockchain supplier Chain and developed Visa B2B Connect. The B2B payments service provided, lile all DLT systems, near real-time notification and finality of payment and a system to record each transaction on the Chain blockchain.

Companies are starting to develop systems and services to use this infrastructure. 

FIS has developed an access platform for FIS’ clients to use Visa’s B2B Connect platform. FIS is integrating its technology with Visa B2B Connect to enable mutual bank clients to send their corporate clients' B2B payments directly to and from another participating bank(s).

Finextra claims that “Visa is ready to start taking on the likes of Swift and Ripple by pushing the platform to banks.” While Kevin Phalen, global head, Visa Business Solutions, Visa, said: "We are excited to continue building momentum for Visa B2B Connect and to bring speed, efficiency and transparency to our financial institution clients through our partners, like FIS, who help make transacting on our platform more accessible and seamless." 

Different Kind of ‘Public’ Blockchain

Philip Morris, the tobacco giant, is building a public blockchain that enables them to, according to coindesk “to track tax stamps on cigarette boxes which are valuable (worth about $5.50 per packet), manually dealt with and easily counterfeited (generally fraudsters use a high-resolution photocopier), costing the industry and governments $100 million a year.”

Smart contracts

Smart contracts – at the core of blockchain technologies – are self-verifying, self-executing agreements that can function autonomously. Smart contracts address the very core of Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions – automating the contract lifecycle to improve compliance, mitigate risk and increase efficiencies across the enterprise.

According to Gartner we are entering, “A New Era of Self-Verifying, Self-Executing, Autonomous Contracts.”

Icertis.Applied Cloud has developed, according to Gartner, a Contract Management platform that “has been incorporating technology and features that are necessary ingredients for transforming contracting business processes by building a unifying, actionable framework for smart contracts – contracts that can evolve to be consistent and be aware of and autonomously navigate changing business conditions.”

KYC blockchain solutions

Distributed Ledger Technology would appear to be ideally suited to bringing together the many different bits and types of information involved in Know Your Customer. Already there are solutions from Jumio, smarktkyc and Tradle.

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CTMfile take: As we said last week, “Blockchain is not dead, just consolidating.”