Blockchain Projects Among Italian Financial Institutions Growing, Research Shows

Italy is having mixed reactions to the blockchain and crypto industry, but how do real financial institutions deal with distributed ledger technology (DLT). The Fintech & Insurtech report of the homonymous observatory of the Milan Polytechnic shows that DLT is being highly adopted in different banks operating within the country.

The director of Blockchain Observatory & Distributed Ledger, Valeria Portale, believes that it is certain to bring various approaches to four sorts of players: the skeptics, the hesitant, the pragmatists, and the leaders.   

Italian banks, according to the reports, have started investing in the nascent technology by both taking part in international and the cooperative projects in the country, and are not neglecting individual projects.   

The Italian government also came out to say that it will underprop DLT and technology innovations such as IoT and AR/VR, with funds worth 1 billion euro, according to a CoinIdol report. This establishment is being pushed by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development (MoED).   

“The MoED will establish a Fund for interventions aimed at encouraging the development of technologies and applications of Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and the Internet of Things, with an allocation of € 15 million for each of the years 2019, 2020 and 2021.”      

An Overview of the Major Initiatives   

Currently, the Italian bank which seems to be most highly involved in the DLT industry is Intesa Sanpaolo, which has a permanent multidisciplinary group on DLT & cryptoassets made of several experts with the innovation, business, security, technological and regulatory background.   

This is a brief summary of the chief initiatives of Italian banks in the DLT sector:

• Intesa Sanpaolo & Mediolanum participated in the International Consortium R3 that was focusing on creating the Corda platform and its great applications.
  

• Unicredit takes part in we.trade, a big platform responsible for managing commercial transactions across SMEs.
• Intesa Sanpaolo takes part in Marco Polo, a big international platform handling Trade Finance.
• Check Interbancaria, a project created by 14 banks working together with Sia, ABILab and NTT Data. The project focuses on creating applications used for interbank tasks in order to enhance the transparency and clearness of data exchanged between financial institutions and boosting the speed of executions while using Corda platform.
• Advance Invoice that is being elevated by Sia & GFT, that engaged many Italian financial institutions such as Credito Valtellinese.
• Intesa Sanpaolo also experimented while collaborating with Eternity Wall startup to record all information on financial transactions especially on Bitcoin (BTC) DLT.
• In August this year, Banca Popolare di Sondrio rolled out a service to register on the BTC DLT the acquiesce for the renewal of the RC Auto policy shown by the client.
• Borsa Italian and IBM successfully tested the DLT in a major project that will substitute paper-based trading certificates produced by SMEs.

Recently, however, Italy was trying to pull back from technology innovations such as DLT, yet pro-blockchain rules are highly increasing across the globe, as CoinIdol recently reported.   

Read more news about blockchain and the cryptocurrency industry of Italy in the Italian language at www.it.coinidol.com