State Bank of India is to begin testing the use of smart contracts next month, with blockchain-enabled know your customer processing to follow. Speaking to the Economic Times, India's largest lender took the wraps off the work conducted by the BankChain consortium, a coalition of 27 Indian and Middle East banks who have been collaborating with vendor PrimeChain to explore and create new applications for banking and finance."By next month, we should have two beta production solutions ready for use by the 27 banks," SBI's head of innovation Sudin Baraoker told the paper. "We will also invite further participation."Baraoker sees plenty of potential for the use of smart contracts at the bank: "Smart contracts can be used for simple things like non-disclosure agreement... rather than signing forms. A lot of internal processes can be contracted. We do a lot of IT procurement, a lot of it can be implemented using blockchain."
The BankChain consortium, which has been working on applications for smart contracts in banking and finance, is set to begin beta-testing two solutions next month with India's biggest lender, PrimeChain Technologies. The trial will also test blockchain-enabled "know your customer" processing at a later date. The consortium consists of a collaboration between almost 30 Indian and Middle Eastern banks and vendor the State Bank.