Euro Banking Association
Notes
Euro Banking Association, founded in 1985, by 18 commercial banks and the European Investment Bank (the bank of the European Union) has a sub-committee providing thought leadership on the application of blockchain technology to the financial services sector.
Its first report was in May 2015 on the use of blockchain in payments. Its view was that the most interesting use-case for banks was in, what the EBA refers to as, ‘asset-centric’ technologies:
“Asset-centric technologies such as Ripple, Stellar and Hyperledger focus on the exchange of digital representations of existing assets (e.g. currencies, metals, stock, bonds etc.) in combination with a shared ledger but not on a public leger. Trust is organised between participants directly, so not through a blockchain and mining as is the case with bitcoin.”
The EBA’s latest report is on trade finance and blockchain technology. The EBA sees real benefit in reducing the costs of managing trade finance, through automated processes.
“By reducing the amount of manual processing involved in trade finance and minimising the costly use of paper instruments, cryptotechnologies can provide real cost savings to banks both in trade finance and in other areas such as payments or cash management.
The use of smart contracts to carry out complex functions of trade agreements can provide additional efficiencies, faster processing, and reduced risk and error rates.”
