According to a press release on The Paypers, UK banking firm Barclays have announced a new partnership between Barclaycard and Crowdz, a blockchain startup that works alongside the Ethereum blockchain in order to provide lightning fast transactions for businesses and institutions.

The partnership comes as a result of Crowdz involvement within the 2018 Barclays accelerator programme, a scheme designed to help fast track fintech companies. Due to the success of Crowdz, Barclays have now agreed the partnership in order to provide future funding to help launch Crowdz, taking it from a concept to a real working product.

According to the press release:

“Under the agreement, Barclaycard’s payment gateway will be integrated into Crowdz’s platform. They will then test the marketplace with a small group of clients to measure its impact on their business and refine the platform’s capability to suit real-world needs. This will take place over 24 weeks, with measurements taken of the buyer and seller customer experience, viability as a value-added product and the quality of the commercial model. If successful, the trial will be expanded in the commercial space.”

See the full article for yourself,

here

.

This will help Crowdz make the most of a sample of Barclays clients, allowing them to rehearse and test their technology in line with the needs of real customers, under the guise of Barclays. Should this prove to be successful, there’s a chance that Barclays will look to roll out the Crowdz service to more of its business clients, which could in turn also have implications for Barclays personal banking customers too, though we expect that adoption on this sort of scale is a little way off just yet.

Crowdz is the company responsible for ZenoChain, an application on the Ethereum blockchain that operates via API. ZenoChain has been designed to make business transactions faster.

According to the Crowdz website:

“Applying cutting-edge artificial-intelligence principles as well as emerging digital technologies like smart contracts and IoT tracking to antiquated & costly B2B commerce systems, the Crowdz platform allows retailers, manufacturers, & brands to buy & sell products throughout the supply chain faster & more efficiently than ever before.”

Moreover:

“The global B2B commerce market will exceed $25 trillion by 2020. Yet, even by then, only about 23% of global B2B sales—and just 11% of B2B sales in the United States—will be digitized. This lack of digitization imposes long delays & huge inefficiencies on business transactions, costing buyers & sellers of all sizes & locations an aggregate of $4 trillion or more each year in unnecessary costs & lost sales.”

See more for yourself,

here

.