The bank that lost its chief financial officer to a Cayman blockchain organisation[1] on Monday has revealed its intention to commercialise its South African distributed ledger solution in Australia.
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), through its South African business TymeDigital, has been working on a blockchain solution that is "actually going into market".
According to the bank's executive manager of emerging technology Chris Conner, the solution is something that can "definitely scale".
"I think the vision we have for that is the first stage is that you can upload documents and share those documents, and then across organisational boundaries, having them validated by third parties and then being able to share those," Conner told the CeBIT Australia conference in Sydney on Tuesday.
"Any financial interaction, whether it's travel or an international money transfer or electricity, there's often supporting documentation for that, so if you think about getting a job or swapping money or swapping title of a property -- so with this solution that we've developed, we will be able to share, create, and validate documents across organisational boundaries."
Conner said that ultimately, this will allow for it to happen at a cross-country level, too.
"We definitely see an opportunity to do that in South Africa, and there's no reason why we can't do it in Indonesia, and also in Australia," he continued.
"I think it's interesting now we're starting to think about how can we do blockchain at an enterprise level? We started with international money transfer with our work with Ripple; we did the Wells Fargo experiment, which was the trade experiment; I think the constraint -- the technology can do it -- now it's the commercial model,