Some people seem to think blockchain is the best technological advancement humanity has come up with since the wheel. Certainly, one can’t deny that blockchain or distributed ledger technology has an intriguing amount of potential.
On the other hand, making that potential actionable takes a house of engineers, resources, and a whole budget line dedicated to caffeine, probably—which is where Synechron’s new blockchain accelerators come in.
The company, a consulting and technology service provider for financial services across the globe, has just announced the launch of its Blockchain Accelerator Program, essentially offering Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) to anyone who wants to take advantage of the innovation.
“We’ve been hearing more and more about blockchain, but many of these companies need help launching Blockchain as a Service,” says managing director of Synechron Sandeep Kumar. “This is a working piece of code; it can be used as-is or integrated [into other systems].”
The program is made up of six accelerators, all geared towards particular subjects where Synechron sees potential: Global Payments, Trade Finance, and Smart Margin Calls, as well as Insurance Claims Processing, KYC (Know Your Customer) and Mortgage Financing and Processing.
The trade finance and insurance accelerators run on Ethereum’s blockchain, while KYC, Mortgage Processing, and Smart Margin Calls run on Hyperledger. Old standby Ripple is taking care of the Global Payments accelerator, which can be linked with some of the other accelerators for more efficiency, including trade finance.
“Payment is the area that has seen the widest adoption for blockchain,” says Kumar. “And trade finance, it’s outdated technology at the moment. Using smart contracts or blockchain, we can reduce fraud and solve other problems there. The trade finance world is a very big one, and hopefully a few banks will show interest.”
The accelerators are available in the cloud, working in a “sandbox environment,” according to Synechron.
This allows financial services to cut down on development time and some of the other infrastructure and investment costs that go along with building the technology, because, well, it turns out building groundbreaking pieces of technology that will change the world as we know it is expensive. Much of what the technology could potentially accomplish is still untested and untried. Even Synechron is still working out some kinks.
“Blockchain technology is still in its initial stages. We aren’t saying [our technology] is production ready; it’s trial or pilot ready,” says Kumar. “The stability of the blockchain, handling large transactions, these are problems that must be solved before banks can go live with their transactions on blockchain.”
To learn more about blockchain, join us at Bank Innovation Israel this November 1-3 in Tel Aviv. Learn more and register here.