Central Bank of France Reports On Its Experiment With Blockchain

The “Banque de France” reported on the bank’s experiment with blockchain technology for the management of SEPA Credit Identifiers.

The Banque de France, start-up Labo Blockchain, Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations and several other French banking groups, launched an experiment on the potential use of Distributed ledger technology in July 2016. By October, the working group had managed to develop a prototype tool for creating and managing SEPA Credit Identifiers (ICS).

According to the press release:

“This experience allows all the participating banks to share their analyses on the impacts and opportunities of this technology. A full assessment will be carried out in the coming months to draw all the lessons learned from the work carried out. A communication on the subject will be presented at the conference organized on 6 January 2017 by the National Committee for Scriptural Payments in Paris.”

The impact of the experiment

Daniel Boutrin, a former security and cryptology expert at the central bank of France, and now the head of research at Banco de Desenvolvimento de Minas Gerais in Paris, who has been working in the banking and finance industry (JP Morgan, BNP, HSBC, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole) for twenty years and has been working with blockchain for two years commented to CoinIdol.com:

“Banque de France is a little project to check some proof of concept on a decentralised information system. The idea is to use payment information system like ICS and check how it does stress a referential holder,” said Daniel Boutrin to CoinIdol.com.

He added:

“It is the first step of study to validate a point I mentioned 1 year ago, aka ASIC transactions.”

According to Daniel Boutrin, Banque de France is maintaining the referential, others are doing transactions and all referential changes are studied on the global system. Daniel Boutrin also noted that referential is a problem that nobody is talking about but must be considered. He said:

“One huge problem nobody is talking about, is referential. It is a critical issue and a problem for ALL referentials. From the point of view of actors a new asset, a new product, a new reference and a new id could lead to a misprice, misproduct or mislead strategy."

"For example, Fortis NVL merges with ABN AMRO, you need to change all on-going transactions Under ABN AMRO. It doesn't only change the transaction parties, but also the market value of it, a credit rating change has a direct impact on eligibility of a transaction. All in all, you clearly see that a chain of events will have a direct impact on referential in order to maintain a clean transaction storage," said Daniel Boutrin. "For payment, the impact is less troublesome, only SWIFT code and SEPA id will be tested in order to deal manually with problems.”