India is experiencing a blockchain craze. Following the central bank’s white paper, another bank announced the use of blockchain for cross-border remittances

As reported not long ago, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has authoritatively released a blockchain white paper (full text download of the white paper), which believes that the development of blockchain is mature enough to be used as a core technology to support the digitization of India's legal currency (rupee).

Axis Bank, India’s third-largest private bank, has announced that it will soon implement Ripple’s blockchain solution into its core banking operations for cross-border remittances, according to Indian business daily The Economic Times.

V Srinivasan, deputy general manager of the bank, said:

“We are committed to using technological innovation to make banking services simpler and more convenient for our customers.”

The bank executive believes that blockchain technology can achieve real-time fund transfers at a more affordable price. Traditional cross-border fund transfers generally take several days to complete, and the service provider also charges a certain percentage of the handling fee.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse sees India, the world’s largest recipient of remittances, as an important market for blockchain development.

“Given that India is the fastest growing economy in the world and the largest recipient of remittances, the country is a very important market that is ripe for payments innovation.

Axis Bank was first revealed to be implementing blockchain transactions in early 2016. At the time, the bank’s chief information officer (CIO) Amit Sethi revealed that the innovation would first impact corporate banking services before making a splash in the retail consumer banking sector.

India’s blockchain boom

Before Axis Bank, its competitor, ICICI, India's largest private bank, announced a successful trial of blockchain remittances in October last year. In mid-2016, ICICI Bank established a digital department dedicated to learning, developing and utilizing blockchain projects. In an interview, the head of ICICI Bank said that the bank is "continuously paying attention" to blockchain technology and intends to provide it to customers as a banking service solution.

More recently, another prominent Indian private bank, Yes Bank, announced the implementation of a multi-node blockchain solution for supplier financing, using a smart contract-based distributed ledger from the open source blockchain project Hyperledger. Yes Bank has IBM as its technology partner, using the tech giant’s “hybrid cloud” platform to host its own blockchain.

The explosive development and deployment of blockchain solutions in India could put the country at the forefront of blockchain adoption, bringing this innovation to the real-world application stage.

It is worth noting that on January 10, Beijing time, China Postal Savings Bank and IBM China held a press conference in Beijing and officially announced the launch of a blockchain-based asset custody system. The system was launched in October 2016 and has successfully executed hundreds of transactions in a real business environment. This is the first successful practice of China's banking industry to apply blockchain technology to the core business system of banks.