There are Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) in the market which cater to multiple industries and their privacy needs based on the use case. But the finance industry has to deal with some standard contracts and trades which are usual in nature and have pre-defined economic attributes. In order to have least turn-around time and DLT implementation Corda has designed an architecture specific to financial agreements and manage financial assets. This would allow global adoption across the financial industry and thereby end up creating industry technology standards for DLT.

Corda began as a single global ledger but when the transaction involves a small subgroup of parties, corda tries to keep the relevant data purely within the subgroup. Corda is a permissioned blockchain which gives the control of government to the organizations participating in the transaction. Corda, designed specifically for the finance industry tackles the issues of privacy and scalability but reaching a consensus on the participants involved in the transaction level and not inside the distributed ledger level making it better suited for the financial industry. Corda is mostly inclined towards handling complex transactions in addition to restricting access to highly sensitive data

Context and Business Case

Identity in the financial services is usually defined by government-issued identity (drivers’ license, passport, social security card, etc.), and Know Your Customer (KYC) processes provide the backbone to financial institutions’ anti-money laundering efforts and help to detect and prevent criminal behaviours. However Despite the importance, KYC at many financial institutions is inefficient and tedious, duplication of effort and risk of error, which is costly and could negatively impact customer experience and ultimately hamper financial institutions brand value.

In the last few years, we have witnessed a few biggest frauds in the banking and financial sector worldwide. Either with $639 billion in assets and $619 billion in debt, Lehman’s bankruptcy filing or the $1.8 billion Indian bank loan fraud in recent years was the big eye-opener. Federal Services Royal Commission (Australia) found that the Home Loans were being given based on fraudulent documents and recently, CNBC has reported* Mortgage fraud risk jumped more than 12 per cent year over year which measures six fraud indicators: identity, income, occupancy, property, transaction and undisclosed real estate debt. All of these fraud cases not only lead to losses to the banks but also increase their operational costs. This seems to be more common for Collateral which is Properties, Factories and Machinery. Banks need to hire agencies to validate the collaterals, agencies to value the collaterals, agencies to validate the titles and so on This has increased the operational cost of banks while adding extra layers of complexity and regulation to the process of lending and borrowing.

The highest number of fraud cases is in the banking and financial services (17.8%), with a median loss of $200,000 (ACFE, 2014).The U.S Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) classified banking institution fraud as tier one strategic priority in its investigation planning (U.S. Department of Justice Report, 2001).

What if there could be a system which is tamper proof, can maintain public history of transactions in real time and once a transaction (financial / nonfinancial) is posted is irreversible?

Enter Blockchain