PwC Selected for Bank of England Fintech Accelerator Program to Conduct Blockchain Proof of Concept

The Bank of England has launched a FinTech Accelerator project, which aims to identify high-tech companies, especially those in the field of blockchain and distributed ledger technology , to promote the innovative development of central bank business through their technologies.

In addition to the profits of the central bank, the selected companies can also solve real-world government regulatory issues through this project, strengthen their connections with other fintech companies, and jointly create a strong corporate network.

This project has a clear selection criteria, and participating companies can be selected into this short-term Proof of Concept (POCs) project through an open and transparent selection mechanism and fair competition.

There are two specific selection criteria. First, the projects must be truly innovative. Second, this research is always based on commercial considerations, so the projects must be consistent with the bank's goal.

At the end of the proof of concept phase, the bank will issue a detailed evaluation report. For those successful projects, the Bank of England will also consider becoming its first customer.

The selected projects currently include areas such as data anonymization, cybersecurity and distributed ledger technology. In addition, the Bank of England is also interested in other areas, including the construction and analysis of large data sets, machine learning, especially anomaly detection, pattern recognition and the protection of sensitive bank data.

The blockchain projects currently selected come from professional services giant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

In order to gain a deeper understanding of blockchain and distributed ledgers, the Bank of England invested in this technology and established a partnership with PwC to form a technical team. They will create a multi-node scalable distributed ledger environment and then create a variety of smart contracts in this environment to test the application of blockchain technology.

Although the technology is relatively immature, the Bank of England believes that in the future it will be able to update its existing banking system and increase system resilience.

The Bank of England believes that in-depth understanding and practical exploration of this field is very necessary, and has set some exploration focuses in the project introduction:

1. Scalability – Banking systems need to have this property in order to ensure data integrity, provide fast and reliable transactions, and increase transaction volume.

2. Security – The banking system needs to ensure the privacy of data on the distributed ledger, ensuring that it cannot be attacked by hackers now and in the future.

3. Privacy - Banks' current protocols are a trade-off between privacy and network resilience. The central bank hopes that distributed ledger technology can ensure both.

4. Interoperability – exploring how existing data standards and structures can interoperate with distributed ledgers.

5. Sustainability - Distributed ledger technology requires more energy and data storage than traditional ledgers for the same transaction volume. So the question is how to reduce the energy and data storage required as transaction volume increases.

At the same time, the Bank of England also welcomes other companies to propose solutions to the above issues.