Skip to main content
Have you been waiting for our Ramadhan Promo? How about this? Book for your photo shot and get 50% price slashed on all casual makeup and gele. Makeup: Glamby Zee Photography: Jessy Photos Graphics: SmartEx Designed: Francis Akujobi

UK Financial Regulator Builds Blockchain App on R3's Corda


The U.K.'s chief financial markets regulator has helped develop a new app using blockchain consortium R3's Corda distributed ledger platform.

Announced today, the prototype – focused on the reporting of mortgage transactions – was revealed to have been built with input from the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and another unnamed banking institution. The app allows regulators to see real-time updates, with receipts being created for mortgage transactions as they are conducted.

That the FCA would be interested in technology that could enhance its oversight is perhaps unsurprising. To date, the FCA has welcomed a number of startups into its regulatory "sandbox," which allows for the testing of financial products and services in a limited setting.

Last year, FCA director of strategy Chris Woodward said that blockchain was one technology that the agency was considering for possible applications.

"[This area] is an opportunity for us to understand how we can best support developments and potentially adopt some RegTech solutions ourselves," he said at the time.

Indeed, the FCA has gone as far as saying publicly that it wants to give breathing room to startups working with financial technologies, including blockchain. In April, the authority announced that it saw no need – at least for now – to adjust its rules to account for the tech.

Popular posts from this blog

Mastercard Hints at Plans for Blockchain Settlement System

Mastercard may be looking to integrate blockchain into its payments infrastructure. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published a  new application  from the financial giant this week that outlines a solution for a "uniform settlement system" – one that would help ease some of the friction involved with business-to-business payments. Specific issues cited in the application include growing data storage demands and the overall volume of transactions. Notably, Mastercard suggests in the text that such a system could include a blockchain-based ledger of transactions. As the application explains: "In some embodiments, the ledger may be a blockchain configured to store the associated data. ... In the system, the data values may include the purchase orders, invoices, transaction data, and other data stored in the ledger as discussed herein." Mastercard clarified that the blockchain would be able to automatically note all changes made to the ...
Read more

Institutional Cryptoeconomics: A New Model for a New Century

Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson and Jason Potts are with the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub in Melbourne, Australia. In this opinion piece, the authors discuss why blockchain may be more disruptive than the so-called 'general purpose technologies' that transformed society in recent centuries.  While cryptoeconomics is already a vibrant research field, the study of the blockchain must not be left solely to computer scientists and game theorists. The rollout of blockchain technology raises complex questions in economics, public policy, law, sociology and political economy. What we call "institutional cryptoeconomics" starts from a simple premise – the blockchain is not just a new general purpose technology, it is a new institutional technology. This may sound like a pedantic distinction, but the difference between these two conceptions is profound. General purpose technologies allow us to do what we already do better, faster and cheaper. Economists und...
Read more

Free Excel course on edx

You shouldn't have to pay to learn! Master the basics of Excel in just 4 weeks in this introductory online course from Microsoft. Learn More   Free Excel course on edx Join edX for free today!
Read more