State Bank of India (SBI), an Indian public sector banking and financial services company, is going to roll out the beta launch of blockchain-powered Know Your Customer (KYC) system next month, the bank’s senior executive said recently.

SBI is a founding member of BankChain – a blockchain consortium initiative by Indian banking majors, formed in collaboration with blockchain startup Primechain Technologies. The consortium has grown to 27 members in India and the Middle East.

As reported by The Economic Times, Sudin Baraokar, head of innovation, SBI, said:

“By next month, we should have two beta production solutions ready for use by the 27 banks. We will also invite further participation. The beta production that will be ready are smart contracts and second is KYC.”

The details of the KYC solution were reported earlier this month by The Economic Times. It stated that Primechain Technologies’ patent pending ‘blockchain and smart contracts based self-managing KYC technology’ would be used for the solution.

Baraokar emphasized on the benefits that consortium initiatives such as BankChain can bring to participating banks. He told the publication:

“BankChain is a big move. It is getting all banks together and collaborating. It is also de-risking our investment in emerging tech, so that all banks can come and invest at once... we can also share knowledge and reduce the cost. We can also use each other's technical teams to take this forward. We focused on solutions that the bank does not have... things like smart contracts, which is not regulatory heavy. We focused on those solutions.”

He also said that the bank is considering implementing blockchain technology for IT procurement.

“Smart contracts can be used for simple things like non-disclosure agreement... rather than signing forms. A lot of internal processes can be contracted. We do a lot of IT procurement, a lot of it can be implemented using blockchain,” said Baraokar.