Australian Banking Giants Join Hands to Use Blockchain for Retail Financing

Blockchain has successfully managed to disrupt the global payments industry and now banking institutions are joining the blockchain bandwagon to test the technology for their products and services.

Australia’s three major banking giants are coming together to bring the blockchain technology for retail financing The Westpac Banking Corporation, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and the ANZ Bank will be joining hands with tech giant IBM and local Westfield mall owner Scentre Group to test the financing contracts.

Currently, most landlords issue their retailers the bank guarantees manually and on paper. The banks are testing to cut down the processing time from months to a day by harnessing the power of blockchain technology. Besides, cutting up on processing times, it also helps to reduce the risk of fraud.

According to the report by Verdict, the banks have currently named their blockchain network as Lygon. Speaking to the publication, ANZ Banking Services Lead, Nigel Dobson, stated:

“This is a unique and transformational platform that enables the complete digitization of bank guarantees. We are proud to have developed this platform in Australia and see truly beneficial outcomes for small-to-medium sized businesses in particular. Retailers of all sizes with physical outlets will experience radically improved bank guarantee cycle times.

“Additionally, retail landlords will benefit from managing their outstanding guarantees in a secure, transparent and auditable manner. We look forward to working with our customers over the coming weeks. While the live platform will benefit retailers with rental bonds, we see the platform eventually supporting all types of bank guarantees and therefore benefiting the wider community.”

Needless to say that the use of blockchain brings two other major benefits of transparency and security to the process of issuing bank guarantees. Dobson was also questioned if they are planning to bring some crypto application to the platform.

To this he replied that currently they haven’t made any immediate plans but “if it made the platform more attractive, made it work faster and gave it some global scale, then we certainly wouldn’t rule out considering it in the future”.