Payments
Banking on the blockchain
Due to launch next year, Fnality promises to revolutionise international payments. Backed by a consortium of major fi nancial institutions, the platform will use blockchain to deliver near-instant payment-on-chain across wholesale banking markets. Tal Abdulrazaq talks to Rhomaios Ram, CEO of Fnality International; Samantha Emery, payments industry and development director at Lloyds; and Jan Lebbe, change manager, fi nancial markets group treasury at ING, to understand the thinking behind the scheme, how it could speed up payments for banks and consumers alike, and if Fnality could presage mainstream banks embracing crypto tech more broadly.
hile the notion of blockchain and cryptocurrency trading is now commonplace, when Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the technology in 2008 it was seen as an oddity by some and an outright security risk by others. Nakamoto – whose true identity is unknown and may well be a moniker for more than one person – released the technology as the global financial crisis was reaching its peak, with several major banks becoming casualties of an economic catastrophe of the sort not seen since the Great Depression. Bitcoin’s birth pangs therefore came at a time when mainstream financial institutions were losing the public’s trust, after haemorrhaging cash and leveraging themselves to the gills on bad credit. Contrary to the
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centralised nature of the big banks, which had caused so much international misery at the expense of taxpayers, Bitcoin offered something new – decentralisation and distribution, effectively threatening to disrupt and upend the traditional order of things. This, as well as its propensity for abuse by criminal organisations, made blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies a focus of heavy criticism in mainstream financial circles.
But we are now almost a decade and a half past those tumultuous days, and blockchain technologies have moved on considerably. Even as we face global inflationary pressures, pushed along by Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine, the period since 2008 has been very good for not just Bitcoin itself (which reached an all-time high of $68,000 before crashing to $19,200) –
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