Shinhan Bank, one of South Korea’s largest banks, is now a member of the Hedera Governing Council. The bank will also begin building its fintech initiatives on Hedera Hashgraph public DLT.
Hedera Hashgraph is a decentralized public network where anyone can build applications. Technically, it’s not a blockchain but a distributed ledger. The platform’s governing council is run by leading organizations including Google, IBM, LG Electronics, Tata Communications, and now Shinhan Bank.
Shinhan Bank was already active in promoting distributed ledger technology (DLTs) to innovate its financial operations. The bank has been providing services such as policy loans, pension funds, and interest rate swap deals on the Hyperledger Fabric enterprise blockchain since 2017. More recently, Shinhan invested in the consortium Korea Digital Asset Custody, and it partnered with LG CNS to develop a blockchain-based central bank digital currency platform. Last month the platform’s preview was demonstrated for the first time.
“Our clients and partners are increasingly interested in the benefits that digital transformation can provide for improving the efficiency and security of financial systems,” said an Official at the Bank. “Hedera’s public distributed ledger in particular is uniquely suited to meet the needs of a widely-used fintech service that must be fast, fair, secure, and enable the controls and visibility required by service providers.”
Hedera is hoping that the high performance and low transaction fees on the network make it attractive for large scale payments. It already boasts Australia’s eftpos as a member. The organization operates Australia’s debit card processing and is owned by Australia’s banks. South Africa’s Standard Bank recently became a member of the council and major payment provider FIS, which owns Worldpay is also on the governing council.
“We see increased interest from financial institutions and governments worldwide in DLT-based financial services for a number of reasons, including increasing the safety and efficiency of wholesale and retail payment systems, facilitating round-the-clock global settlements, enabling a cashless society, providing a more trusted system than private e-money, and helping in the financial inclusion of the bank-less population,” said Hedera CEO Mance Harmon.
Before Shinhan, the last member to join the Council was Électricité de France (EDF), at the beginning of March this year. EDF is notable in its efforts to combat climate change and its involvement with Hedera is in part due to the platform’s computational efficiency as a decentralized network.
Meanwhile, the Hedera Hashgraph platform is host to an increasing number of solutions. These include Everyware, which launched a DLT solution that monitors the temperature of Covid-19 vaccines in storage rooms. Hala systems, a social enterprise that provides early warnings in conflict zones, adopted Hedera’s DLT at the end of last year.
