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Santander, the 10th largest bank in the world, is currently experimenting with blockchain to see how it might be used to improve banking.
June 19, 2015
Santander, listed as the 10th largest world bank by Forbes, currently is experimenting with blockchain to see how it might be used to improve banking, according to a report by Business Insider.
Santander currently believes that blockchain could help reduce costs by $20 billion annually.
Santander InnoVentures head Mariano Belinky said at MoneyConf that the company is looking at many different ways that blockchain technology could be utilized.
"For us, the first obvious space to explore all of this in is payments, particularly international payments. Later on we think smart contracts have the potential to transform many of the other things we do," Belinky told Business Insider. "We still haven’t made anything official, we haven’t announced anything publicly, but we have an internal team working on this. We’ve done some proof of concepts."
However, Stephen Pair, CEO of Bitpay, believes it will take a while for banks to adopt blockchain. "I've been in and around banks for a while and they take years, even with software that's well known and well understood," Pair said in an interview with Business Insider.
