Leveraging Blockchain for Banking and Business Processes

After the cryptocurrency burst last year, the market consolidates around leading exchanges and payment systems following the stablecoins trend and reducing the volatility of the market. The pioneer Ripple with its network of banks and payment providers, Circle payment technology and Coinbase exchange joint USD coin, JP Morgan with its U.S dollar backed coin, and other stablecoins such as Tether or BitSpark are competing to provide cross-border payments. Not only payment may leverage blockchain but also other business processes in banking as well as regulated sectors such as insurance.

Before moving toward Open Banking based on permissioned blockchain, the sector has deployed standards following the EU’s P2D2 with the Open Bank Project. The Open API (Application Programming Interfaces) framework allows banks to open up existing systems and share them internally. Moreover, the microservices layer on top of their existing environment enables easy plug-and-play integration. Following the microservices architectural style, Open Banking platforms will look at the next integration evolution – blockchain to build the new generation of distributed business processes.

Among the new solutions for business integration, Unibright aims to connect existing business processes with blockchain networks by generating smart contracts. Kaleido’s enterprise blockchain, backed by ConsenSys, helps to build enterprise blockchain consortia with the same underlying technologies and cloud providers. In addition to a multi-cloud Platform-as-a-Service, Chainstack includes a multi-protocol feature. Finally, Stratumn decided to focus on the protocol itself betting on Proof of Process to provide consortium blockchain technologies reinventing inter-business relationships.

This article is part of the Global Fintech Ecosystem series