We often hear about all of the applications of blockchain technology in financial services, but there are very few solutions which have reached a point where they are ready for prime time. Today we learned that Global Debt Registry was leveraging IBM Blockchain for their new decentralized ledger. Loan data serving the ABS market will now be available on the cloud-based IBM Blockchain Platform.

The ABS market relies on a variety of service providers throughout the supply chain which leads to inefficiencies in the process. Putting this information on the blockchain also allows for greater transparency for issuers, auditors and of course, investors.

What’s interesting about this announcement is the new GDR decentralized registry has already registered over 700,000 loans across multiple credit facilities. It’s no surprise that the focus has been on the digital or online lending market. Specifically, the press release noted that investment banks are currently leveraging the platform to manage their positions in Avant among others.

Kevin Friedrich, VP Finance & Treasury from Avant provided the below statement in the press release:

Avant is committed to serving its capital partners with innovative technical solutions to maximize transparency and ease of collateral management, as further demonstrated through our use of GDR’s blockchain based registry.

Conclusion

If we look back at the early days of p2p lending, access to loan level data was one of the aspects that made the next generation of lenders revolutionary. Leveraging blockchain technology is the next iteration of this, offering transparency to investors in a more seamless way. Given the benefits to numerous stakeholders and efficiency gains it is also one that could scale quickly.