THE bid to boost transparency in business operations in the country got a big lift when IBM recently introduced the so-called blockchain technology in the country.

Blockchain has been for a long time; around eight or nine years, according to IBM Corp. Asia Pacific Open Source Solutions Arch. Manoj Pattabhiraman.

In a news briefing on February 28, Pattabhiraman said enterprise-level business in the Philippines and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region are just warming up to the blockchain technology. However, he said the challenge of implementing blockchain is the lack of trust within the information-technology (IT) systems. As an option, he said intermediary systems will handle the transfer of funds or products of any transaction.

Within the blockchain, the companies and the banks will be in the ledger for the transaction, according to Pattabhiraman.

Nevertheless, the Philippines is still not a user of blockchain. Among the countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), Singapore is one of the most pervasive users of using the system. IBM Chief Technologist Lope Doromal said there are customers interested to try blockchain and bring it to production. However, he said they don’t have the technical knowhow.

“Certain entities are not comfortable to share information in the cloud. Business is the target of blockchain,” Doromal said. “Ideally, it is for businesses that deal with industries, like dealing with letters of credit.”

Meanwhile, IBM also announced a collaborative cross-industry effort created to advance blockchain technology got new 11 members to help create an open standard for distributed ledgers for a new generation of transactional applications.

“Growth and interest in [the project] remain high in 2017,” an IBM partner was quoted as saying. “We’re now at 122 members and seeing even more diverse organizations across industry sectors invest their energy and resources in understanding how blockchain technology can strengthen their own business processes.”

According to documents provided by IBM, the new set of members’ combined backgrounds and experiences will be invaluable to the community, “as we strive to increase production deployments through this year.”

The project called Hyperledger aims to enable organizations to build industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support individual business transactions. It is a global collaboration including leaders in finance, banking, information of technology, supply chain, manufacturing and technology.