From five rural banks in the Philippines to the Bank of Canada, Payments – Canada; from real-time payments and huge financial inclusion goals (35 million unbanked Filipinos) to cash and security settlements; blockchain seems to be catching the BFSI fancy with a new furore.
The Union Bank of the Philippines (UnionBank) aims to do away with data center, cyber security infrastructure and tap blockchain in a $3 million project for bank-to-bank connections on the technology that can scale up to 500-odd rural banks in the Philippines.
The project underway in Canada, on the other hand, is trying to crack how parties performing node to node transactions stay away from broadcasting their transactions to others on the network – a function, apparently, both crucial and tricky for this genre of financial services.
It’s not just the adoption that’s worth noting here, but how and where of it too.