BBVA’s blockchain loan platform wins banking tech innovation award

Last month, Spanish bank BBVA won The Banker’s Tech Projects Award for its blockchain corporate lending platform. The publication noted that BBVA’s basket of deals ranging from €35 million to €1 billion helped it win the award (see below).

The Banker said that the number of entries for the distributed ledger technology (DLT) award more than doubled this year, hinting at the increased maturity of the industry.

BBVA’s blockchain is a hybrid network— private and public. The private platform, which is based on Hyperledger Fabric enables transparency of the negotiation process between the bank and the customer. It records all the steps and data related to the deal which can be monitored only by the parties involved.

On the other hand, the public network uses Ethereum. It records the time-stamped hash – like a digital fingerprint – of the finalized deal on the public blockchain.

BBVA said it is encouraging its clients to host their own blockchain nodes. The bank is also building a do-it-yourself portal for its clients.

“Blockchain is a useful technology because its features of real-time, traceability and transparency are instrumental to creating smart interactions and front-to-back automation,” said Ricardo Laiseca, head of Global Innovation & Analytics and data analysis at BBVA. “We believe blockchain technology is a long-term play, creating faster, easier and safer ways to share data and pieces of data modularly.”

Last year, BBVA said it was working with German automaker Daimler to test tokenization and is creating blockchain tokens for staff to use.

Examples of BBVA loan pilots: