EY has announced a multimillion-dollar investment in blockchain talent, technology and facilities in Europe.

The firm said that it is expanding its European teams that develop innovative blockchain-based products to address current and future client demand. With the latest investment, EY’s blockchain teams in Europe will quadruple over the next 12 months and expand the company’s blockchain development footprint worldwide, connecting its teams with established blockchain development hubs in New York, London and Trivandrum, India.

"We are expanding our blockchain teams across Europe, beginning in France, the UK and Germany. These expanded development teams are aligned with our global R&D labs and will be integrated with our financial services and business operations teams to enable business-led, innovative products that address industry issues using blockchain technology. Our target is to double our investment in new product development in Europe around blockchain technology and integrate all of these into our global blockchain community,” Paul Brody, EY Global Innovation Leader, Blockchain, said.

EY said that over 50 of its clients in 15 countries have signed blockchain agreements in industries ranging from logistics, to consumer packaged goods, to banking. Projects in Europe include a private blockchain project with BNP Paribas' ALM-Treasury department to optimize the bank's global internal treasury operations, and the launch of an EY wine blockchain in Italy, created by EY and start-up EZ Lab to help document the quality and geographic origin of wines made in Italy.

There are a number of EY blockchain platforms being built and designed to support industry process and operations platforms with patent-pending applications of this emerging technology. This includes EY Ops Chain, EY Tesseract, and EY bitcoin analyzer, among others.