Be careful on blockchain implementation say ANZ, Westpac executives
(1 July 2016 – Australia) Earlier this week, executives from two of Australia’s largest banks have expressed concerns over the implementation of blockchain technology.
Speaking at the 2016 Blockchain Summit in Melbourne, ANZ Bank’s strategy executive, Nicholas Groves said the technology should be thoroughly tested prior to implementation.
“We spend a lot of time reading and learning about blockchain.
“There are concerns within the bank that we may be exposing ourselves to risks we don’t understand. We need to be conscious of what we’re building. We need to understand the data,” he said.
Of Australia’s Big Four, ANZ Bank is the only one not involved in R3 CEV, a global consortium of 42 financial institutions investigating use cases for the distributed ledger technology.
“Collaboration is essential but it’s also tricky — the best results will come from a combination of institutions and start-ups working together,” he said.
Westpac’s director of payments Michael Southwell added that the progress in developing the technology was “stifled”, despite the excitement show from larger enterprises.
“You need innovation which comes from the startups, but you also need scale which comes from the banks,” he said.
Southwell pointed to the negative consequences from the US government’s move to rush through banking reforms following the September 11 attacks, saying it was important to take care when introducing new technologies to “systemically important payment systems”.
“It goes to show how sensitive these platforms are and how rigorous the testing from a legal and regulatory perspective is.”
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