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Blockchain Revolution Series: Amid Mixed Bag of Interest in Blockchain, ANZ Appears To Be Laggard With Conventional Banking Style

We saw J.P. Morgan has given topsy-turvy stances about cryptocurrency when Jamie Dimon bluntly criticized but the company has now made an official announcement about its digital currency initiative ‘JPM’s Coin’ and divulged about its digital coin payment.

This is Ethereum-based stablecoin which is the extension of JPMorgan’s blockchain initiative, Quorum, an enterprise-level distributed ledger protocol forked from the Go Ethereum client.

The other financial services giant has reportedly begun working with three "mainstream" crypto hedge funds. Northern Trust’s efforts of exploring in new blockchain offerings for private equity, crypto hedge funds.

While another global banking giant HSBC has already clarified back in May’2108 as to how the world’s first commercially viable blockchain trade finance transaction on the Corda platform was successfully executed, that was developed by the R3 blockchain consortium. Later on, other banking players, such as Deutsche Bank and Rabobank also teamed up to launch a trade finance platform.

Amid all these developments, the conventional financial institutions do not seem to be under any pressures, nor do they seem to have any apprehensions over the non-reliable transactions introduced by Bitcoin (BTC) and its peers. 

However, famous banking firms like Barclay and Citibank appear to be taking very conscious and gradual steps in this segment.

Although ANZ has actually begun their work on projects involving blockchain, Maria Bellmas, ANZ Institutional’s associate director of trade and supply chain products, thinks that Blockchain has been the darling of the tech world for some time and increasingly so over the medium term, perhaps in part pushed by scorned crypto fanatics grasping for some justification of their obsession in the wake of the bitcoin collapse. Sold as a solution to all of life’s problems, blockchain offers a ton of legitimate solutions for businesses – but raises just as many questions, as per the sources.

Bellmas ponders that - Is there any essentiality of blockchain technology for conventional financial institutions to improvise their offerings. She reckons that traditional banks “do not necessarily need it and are better off using existing good old databases and technology solutions.”

The head of payments policy department of RBA, Tony Richards himself had told back in 2018 that, “I would like to thank the Australian Business Economists for the invitation to provide a Reserve Bank perspective on cryptocurrencies and distributed ledger technology. This is a topic that is of great interest across the community. It is an area that the Bank has been watching closely for a number of years as it could have implications for us from a number of perspectives. It is also of interest to our international counterparts and so has been the subject of a lot of joint work done in the various committees that we participate in at the Bank for International Settlements”.

As the saying “Change is the only constant”, we’ve been witnessing the change in financial transformation with the assistance of blockchain.

Currency Strength Index: FxWirePro's hourly BTC spot index is inching towards -116 levels (which is bearish), while hourly USD spot index was at 20 (mildly bullish), while articulating (at 11:29 GMT).

For more details on the index, please refer below weblink: http://www.fxwirepro.com/currencyindex

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