IBM is now moving into banking compliance, by purchasing Promontory Financial Group they hope they can use the compliance company's expertise to teach Watson about banking compliance; "Part of why we bought Promontory was, these systems (meaning Watson), they do have to be trained," explained IBM CEO Ginni Rometty; IBM believes artificial intelligence can help across the banking industry and ease the burden on specific firms. Source
IBM announced the launch of financial modeling investment app tools with cognitive programming for developers; the development is part of the firm's new IBM Cloud for Financial Services unit; with the announcement, IBM appears to be taking a lead role in supporting investment app development and is also integrating Watson and other cognitive programming. Source
The two firms have built the Yijian Blockchain Technology Application System; the platform seeks to increase transparency of pharmaceutical supply chain networks by tracking the flow of drugs, encrypting trading records and more easily authenticating transactions; overall it is expected to increase payments efficiency and reduce the payments timing for pharmaceutical retailers; the Yijian System is still in a pilot phase and expects to expand in July. Source
The running joke is that after Dodd-Frank banks have become compliance companies that happen to make loans. It is funny...
The main driver of today's entry is the news -- which has largely percolated -- that ConsenSys acquired Quorum from J.P. Morgan, as well as received an investment from the bank in the company. There is a lot of jargon in the blockchain industry, and I want to try to pull this news apart to explain why it is interesting both to incumbent financial services players, as well as meaningful to the developing decentralized finance industry.
IBM announced a partnership with Stellar.org and KlickEx Group to help small businesses in underdeveloped countries participate in global trade; the partnership will focus on financial transactions across borders and currencies; this will allow businesses in these areas to get access to IBM’s scale and bank partnership network. Source.
The blockchain sector is beginning to gain some promising traction and Big Tech remains keenly aware of the potential impact...
From a financial incumbent point of view, if you are going to mutualize infrastructure, you need to actually mutualize the infrastructure. This means solving the game theory problem of accidentally giving away the value of your back office systems to your biggest, best-funded bank competitor -- not a competitive equilibrium. To that end, technology companies are a natural place for maintaining crypto systems. However, note that public chains today already have the benefit of billions of dollars in cyber-security spending (i.e., mining) and the dedicated engineering of thousands of open source developers. By choosing to use a public chain, you get this out of the box. With a proprieraty solution, even if the end-results are open-sourced, community is impossible to replicate. Maybe this is why IBM bought Red Hat for $34 billion, and Microsoft bought GitHub for $7 billion.
IBM and Maersk have completed a successful blockchain solution project for the container supply chain industry; plan to expand the solution to 10 million of the 70 million containers shipped annually; solution could provide cost savings for ship carriers of $38 billion per year. Source
The real time payments network Zelle has added new tech partners to their growing network; partners include ACI Worldwide, CGI, D3 Banking Technology and IBM; the new partners will help to accelerate technology, reduce risk and control costs for Zelle as their payments network grows over time. Source.