Asian finance giant to build blockchain-based transaction platform

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One of Asia-Pacific’s largest financial services providers, Japan-based AEON Financial Service, is partnering with IBM Japan to develop a blockchain-based financial platform for the Asian market, the company announced.

The platform will include Asia-wide transactions, settlements and virtual currency payments between consumers and businesses, allocation and redemption of loyalty points, and transaction data management, said Masaaki Mangetsu, AEON’s managing director, global business strategy.

“We foresee great opportunities in using blockchain to build this platform, and will aim to use it to improve our current financial services offerings, as well as offering new services to underserved customers in Asian countries,” Mangetsu said.

Yoshiki Minowa, Vice President, Partner – Cognitive Process Transformation, Global Business Services, IBM Japan, said “blockchain has the potential to revolutionise ways businesses work together with their ecosystem partners… [establishing] accountability and transparency while streamlining business processes.”

First-stage trials for the blockchain-based service are set to commence in July, 2017 for the Japanese market, with further rollouts anticipated across 11 other Asia-Pacific countries over the year.

The trial will be conducted on Hyperledger Fabric, an IBM-led blockchain framework, and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. According to a release by IBM, Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies.