Infosys’ new blockchain banking solution doubles its partners in a month

• The new blockchain banking solution by Infosys, India Trade Connect, had seven partner banks in May.
• Come June, India Trade Connect now has 14 banks within its purview.
• Adopting blockchain technology for banking is speculated to increase efficiency and add security to transactions.

Initially, Infosys’ new blockchain banking solution, India Trade Connect, went live with seven banks under the umbrella. Now, within the span of one month, that number has doubled to fourteen

India Trade Connect, formerly called Finacle Trade Connect, is a blockchain platform that helps banks with loans for trade transactions within the country. Between the 14 institutions lies more than half of India’s internal trade transactions.

India isn’t alone in its impetus to adopt blockchain technology for banking. Financial institutions all over the world are looking to blockchain-oriented solutions on the basis that its digital ledger saves time, adds a layer of security and enables transparency.

Despite the advantages of adopting blockchain technology, there are still a lot of questions on the table that do not have answers yet.

The dark side

First off, blockchain technology isn’t full proof. Hacks and scams still occur. The only difference is that since the information will now be distributed instead of having a centralised point of access, obtaining data would be harder and much slower.

Second, there are experts who are of the opinion that implementing blockchain technology in the banking sector is a move in the wrong direction. It is mainly because there’s still a lot of regulatory ambiguity around the validity of blockchain data. Tampering with data may be difficult but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all data has integrity.

Also, one should consider the irony that blockchain came into being as an anti-establishment piece of technology and now it’s a tool in the hands of the mainstream. Initially, the whole point of blockchain was that users wouldn’t need to use a bank anymore.