Blockchain

IBM's new Blockchain Founder Accelerator could better position the distributed ledger technology as a platform for mainstream payments, but the technology giant wants to start with baby steps.

It is not startups but rather Silicon Valley’s biggest names that are best-positioned to compete with banks in the blockchain race.

Some banks seek to dominate the digital-identity business, but they stand to benefit even if their efforts fall short.

Royal Bank of Canada is applying blockchain technology to its loyalty program, in an effort to make its rewards more tangible and accessible.

Cambridge Blockchain, one of many startups applying blockchain technology to customer privacy and data collection issues, is teaming up with LuxTrust to launch a new identity platform.

Stellar, which started as a splinter group from Ripple, has formed a for-profit company called Lightyear.io to help financial institutions integrate its software.

The roughly $2 million investment comes as banks keep joining (and in some cases, leaving) various distributed ledger projects as they try to pick the winners in a young field.

Sovrin, a new blockchain for the creation and management of digital identities, may help credit unions save money and fight fraud while returning power to individuals.

Blockchain technology requires major change in people and processes and smaller banks need to prepare, according to Joe Dewey, an attorney at Holland & Knight and author of a new book about distributed ledger technology.

The bank has quit the R3 consortium, whose tech decisions were at odds with its own.

With an ever-increasing number of unsecured devices connected to one another, the potential for cyberattackers to overwhelm any organization is a clear and present danger.

The global messaging network Swift and its fintech challenger, Ripple, have been vying for bankers’ hearts and minds for more than a year. Whoever prevails, their latest moves could bring needed change to how international banking is done.

There has been a lot of activity lately around modernizing cross-border transfers through the use of blockchain and and cloud-hosted technology, but despite the potential savings in cost and time, none of these methods has caused a meaningful decline in the use of cash.

Using a program built by Ripple, BBVA has transferred about 50 euro-denominated payments to Mexico from Spain in seconds. Such transactions normally take up to four days to clear, the bank said.

Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA, Spain’s No. 2 lender, has executed its first cross-border payments through a system based on the software that supports bitcoin.

Ripple's distributed ledger platform has fed an appetite for cheaper and more efficient cross-border payments, but it may not measure up to the needs of a larger market. Ripple wants to scale its payment system to something resembling a large card network.

The bank said the test showed blockchain can be used to conduct secure, low-cost cross-border payments without intermediaries.

The blockchain-based platform, set to launch later this year, promises to make gold trading around the world faster, more transparent and safer.

Five banks and the tech firms R3 and HQLA^X are using distributed ledger technology to make it easier to transfer liquid securities and collateral.

Genpact's new platform promises to reduce the number of past-due invoices to less than 3% in most companies.