Highlights:

Banking Giant HSBC has announced their plans implement a form of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)

They have announced that about $20 Billion worth of assets will be traded and transferred on a form of DLT

That amount account to more than 40% of all assets directly owned by the Bank

According to Reuters, HSBC, one of the biggest banking corporations in the world, has recently announced that it will start with transferring all of its accounting and information to an undisclosed blockchain. This move can be compared with HSBC’s long term vision of doing away with paper based trading and transacting.

The news comes ahead of an expected shake-up of HSBC’s global banking and markets division, with interim Chief Executive Noel Quinn seeking to cut costs and improve returns in the business.

The bank has been known for its experimentation with blockchain tools for more than a year now. In January of 2019, HSBC announced it had settled some 3 million foreign exchange transactions using a blockchain platform, conducting some $250 billion in trades in the process. The sum included another 150,000 in payments. Since then, the dependence on the technology has only increased.

HSBC is only transferring 40 percent of its records onto a blockchain, of the $50 billion in assets that the bank claims to hold.

HSBC is just one of hundreds of Banks and other financial firms that have invested billions of dollars into finding uses for blockchain. Few, however, have come up with practical or widely-used applications.