Banking Behemoth HSBC Used Blockchain For Transactions Worth $250 Bn in 2018

By Prashant Jha

Reports suggest that HSBC, a multinational banking company of great repute, has made use of blockchain technology quite heavily in the past year. The Financial Times carried a press release from the end of the company, claiming that the banking firm had settled Forex trade worth $250 billion using this revolutionary technology.

HSBC has a proprietary blockchain platform developed especially for its use, known as “FX Everywhere”. Using it, HSBC processed a significantly high number of transactions, about 3 million since February 2018, when it was officially launched. These 3 million transactions have led to a whopping number of 150,000 payments, proving just how much of a difference the technology has made to the bank’s operations.

Richard Bibbey, who serves as the global head (acting) of currencies with HSBC, commented that this technology is beneficial to the bank as it attempts to:

“conduct thousands of foreign exchange transactions within the bank, across multiple balance sheets, in dozens of countries”

He added that:

“FX Everywhere uses distributed ledger technology to drastically increase the efficiency of these internal flows.”

Since the release did not inform the press and the public of the overall total volume of transactions that the bank handled in the past year. This makes it impossible to compute what percentage of the total volume the blockchain-powered transactions were.

According to a Reuters report, Richard Bibbey acknowledged that these blockchain-based transactions were indeed a small section of the massive volume the bank usually handles.

Having said that, there is no denying that even this kind of a volume on transactions processed using blockchain is a huge step forward for the traditional finance industry. It is particularly encouraging for blockchain enthusiasts because HSBC is a banking behemoth that has managed to build a very credible brand over the years.

When such a brand chooses to go with blockchain technology, it definitely does a lot in terms of boosting the adoptability of the same. HSBC has dabbled in blockchain earlier as well, for example launching a joint trade finance platform based on blockchain at Hong Kong in November 2018.

You May Also Read- Blockchain Use Case: Payments