Innovate Finance and Hartree Centre to Launch FinTech Blockchain Lab

Innovate Finance, the independent membership association serving the global FinTech sector, today announced it will establish a blockchain lab in partnership with the Hartree Centre, the high performance computing and data analytics research facility founded by the UK government in collaboration with IBM.

The proposed lab is a response to Innovate Finance blockchain members seeking to come together to collaborate on developing use cases for blockchain in financial services and to help accelerate its adoption as a viable infrastructure to build new applications.

Blockchain is the technology that underpins Bitcoin currency. It was built to provide a digital record of transactions on a visible ledger that is shared between different parties. Blockchain has become one of the most talked about FinTech innovations due its potential in transforming the way we interact with the digital world – from automatic identity authentication and data keeping to money transfer.

Participants of the Innovate Finance lab will bring a wealth of blockchain knowledge to the center. In return, they will leverage the power of Hartree’s high-performance computing (HPC) solutions for their blockchain exploration, which use parallel processing to deliver unprecedented computing speeds to solve problems and to provide accurate predictions and data analysis for new applications and technologies.

“We are excited about the prospect of our members openly collaborating to deliver use cases to the wider community,” said Innovate Finance’s CEO Lawrence Wintermeyer.

“If we can use the lab to develop open standards for the blockchain in financial services, we will be moving one step closer to accelerating the mass adoption of this breakthrough technology.

By combining the forces of Hartree’s technology facilities and Innovate Finance’s member expertise, the lab will set out to develop practical use cases for blockchain, ranging from payment settlement applications that can be used inside of a single company, to new use cases for AML, KYC, and digital currencies, which can be adopted by players across the sector to deliver significant benefits to customers, partners, and regulators.

David Moss, Advanced Technology Solutions Manager at the Hartree Centre, said:

“This is a formidable partnership built on expertise and a hunger to develop innovations that can have a meaningful and sustainable impact on the financial services sector and the UK economy.  The Hartree Centre is very excited about this new initiative and look forward to working closely with Innovate Finance members to learn from the knowledge they bring and to harness the power of our world class computing systems. Together we will examine how blockchain technology can shape a new and better future for financial services and possibly other sectors too.”

The lab is scheduled to be up and running in October with the first set of prototype use cases developed by the end of this year. Benefits of the lab to Innovate Finance members include access to a blockchain sandbox, which will enable participants to tap into and experiment with new blockchain platform technologies and to test the use cases that are developed.

About Innovate Finance

Innovate Finance is an independent membership association that represents the global FinTech sector across the UK. Members range from promising startups to leading global corporations, all with a technology-centric approach to innovation in financial services.  The organisation brings together companies from sectors such as insurance, retail and investment banking, payments, crowdfunding, big data, and alternative finance to promote and accelerate growth for the evolution of financial services. Innovate Finance provides members with a single point of access to policymakers, regulators, partners, investors, customers, educators and talent. The mission is to foster better consumer outcomes through greater choice, social inclusion, diversity, resilience and investment in the new technologies that are transforming the sector for the benefit of all.

The organisation is supported by the City of London Corporation and the Canary Wharf Group, and through membership fees. Launched in August 2014, it has over 100 members, including Barclays, HSBC, Silicon Valley Bank, Nutmeg, Zopa, Monitise, Transferwise, Azimo, Syndicate Room, Ratesetter, Prophis Technologies and GoCoin.

About The Hartree Centre

Founded in 2012 with a 37.5 million GBP investment from the UK government, the Hartree Centre was created by the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to develop, deploy and demonstrate high-performance computing (HPC) solutions. Part of a center of expertise in computational science and engineering, the Hartree Centre is a research collaboratory in association with IBM, with facilities at the Sci-Tech Daresbury and Harwell Oxford national science and innovation campuses

Using parallel processing to deliver unprecedented computing speeds, HPC can be used to tackle new frontiers of problem-solving, prediction and data analysis. As advanced modelling and simulation combined with Big Data capabilities continue to change the face of science and engineering, its potential for other industries is only just beginning to be revealed. The Hartree Centre’s mission is to bring down the barriers to entry for businesses that may not have even considered using HPC services before. With a recent report estimating that European leadership in HPC could add as much as between two and three percent to Europe’s GDP by 20201, investments in the field of supercomputing potentially offer high returns with relatively low risk.