Bank of England to Explore Distributed Ledger Tech for Settlement
The Bank of England has indicated it will consider the impact of distributed ledgers as part of a plan to modernize the country’s settlement system. During a speech given at the Bank of England yesterday, Minouche Shafik, the central bank's deputy governor for markets and banking, laid out a four-point vision for the initiative, which has the mandate to deliver goals by the end of this year, with technological development beginning in 2017. The blueprint will seek to answer four questions, Shafik said. These include defining the bank’s policy objectives, determining what functions the....
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The UK's newly opened FinTech accelerator is seeking additional ways to explore blockchain tech. Speaking during an event in London this week, the chief cashier of the Bank of England, Victoria Cleland, discussed the central bank's efforts involving financial technology, including the founding of a startup accelerator focused on financial applications. It's here that the Bank of England is seeking to study concepts such as distributed ledger-based digital currency, but the organization is already looking to move beyond its currently disclosed projects. Cleland said: "[Distributed....
Hardly anyone can deny the financial ecosystem will need to undergo an overdue change sooner rather than later. The legacy system is not able to keep up with growing consumer demands and needs. Over in the United Kingdom, the Bank of England will develop a blueprint for this overhaul, focusing on new payment preferences and distributed ledger technology. Bank of England Looks At Distributed Ledger Technology. Revamping the UK’s entire financial ecosystem will be quite the challenge, even for the Bank of England. At the same time, a lot of work has been done already, as consumers are....
The Bank of England has been one of the more aggressive central banks to investigate blockchain and distributed ledger technology, but at least one of its officials doesn’t believe widespread adoption will happen anytime soon. Andrew Hauser, the central bank’s executive director for banking, payments and financial resilience, made the remarks during a speech on the history of how the Bank of England developed its settlement systems over the past 20 years. His speech took place at the CREST Twentieth Anniversary Conference on 20th September, an event commemorating the launch of the UK-based....
In order to safeguard the stability of the United Kingdom’s financial system, the Bank of England is exploring the next generation of its Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) service, according to a bank document [PDF]. RTGS is the platform for providing sterling central bank reserves to provide safe final settlement for transactions between banks. The bank has created a vision for the future RTGS service and is seeking feedback. The distributed ledger’s resilience characteristics are potentially attractive to the bank from a financial stability perspective. It is unlikely, however, that....
In a transcript of a cancelled speech released online today, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney cited a "central bank digital currency" as a development that could result from its ongoing distributed ledger proof-of-concepts. The remarks come as global central banks begin to experiment openly with distributed ledgers, a technology inspired by the decentralized, public ledgers used to run cryptocurrencies. But, whereas bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies perhaps sought to create wholly new financial systems, distributed ledger projects are aimed at reducing settlement times and....