Royal Bank of Canada Expands Blockchain Testing Beyond Loyalty
As the calendar turns to February, major global financial institutions are becoming increasingly vocal about the blockchain tech trials taking place in their innovation labs. In recent weeks, UBS has announced experiments with smart bond applications, NRI has discussed investigating distributed ledgers for securities use cases and even JPMorgan, long one of the more bearish among banks on bitcoin and digital currency concepts, revealed it is seeking to evaluate the technology's use for improving trading processes. More unique among these major firms, however, has been Royal Bank of Canada....
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Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) president and CEO Dave McKay called bitcoin's underlying distributed ledger a "quantum innovation" during a roundtable discussion today. At the RBC Capital Markets conference in New York, McKay discussed RBC's ongoing experimentations with the blockchain, stating that the bank may seek to launch a loyalty program that uses the technology sometime in 2016, American Banker reports. In his remarks, McKay indicated he believes the bank's experiments with the blockchain need to be introduced with "caution", echoing statements made by the US Securities and Exchange....
The Central Bank of Canada revealed yesterday it is developing a digital version of the Canadian dollar based on blockchain technology. Called CAD-coin, the project is part of a wider exploration of the emerging technology codenamed Project Jasper that was reportedly unveiled during a private presentation, according to The Financial Times. Other major banks including Bank of Montreal, CIBC, Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank and TD Bank, as well as banking consortium startup R3CEV, are said to be involved in the effort. A slide posted by Forbes provides more details, indicating that the Bank....
The Bank of Canada has announced that it will soon publish the results of its own coordinated blockchain experiment. As part of the project, the bank built a functioning blockchain prototype and fiat-backed digital token. The Central Bank of Canada Has Tested Blockchain Protocol. Carolyn Wilkins, the central bank’s senior deputy governor, said the bank....
Britain’s Royal Mint and Chicago-based CME Group, a derivatives marketplace, have now entered testing of their gold trading platform based on blockchain technology, ahead of its planned launch later this year. Bitcoin startup BitGo is notably playing the part of a developer alongside blockchain firm AlphaPoint in helping the CME Group to develop the open-source blockchain. The startup’s multi-signature technology, used for its bitcoin wallets, will be the core security technology used for the blockchain trading platform. “Distributed ledger technology is a game changer and supplying gold....
Canada's largest bank is seeking a patent for a secure means of processing payments that could connect with a public blockchain. On 19th January, the US Patent and Trademark Office published an application from the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) for "secure processing of electronic payments". The application, submitted in July 2016, details the use of trusted devices to administer, process and store payment transactions, in an environment utilizing digital wallets and merchant-based points-of-sale (POSs). As envisioned, some of these applications could be used to connect to an....