MasterCard international President Ann Cairns has called blockchain, the technology powering bitcoin, a very promising technology which MasterCard sees as a “good thing for the future.”

Private banking corporations, investment banks, stock exchanges, and even central banks have taken deliberate, extensive measures to understand the innovation of blockchain technology in an effort to apply it in their own respective realms. Global card payments network MasterCard is among the companies investing in blockchain technology.

Ann Cairns, president of international markets at for MasterCard, a job that makes her responsible for the management of all markets outside North America weighed in with her take on blockchain technology. Deeming it as a “very exciting new technology,” she revealed that MasterCard is looking to integrate the innovation of a distributed ledger within MasterCard’s core systems.

Cairns was speaking to European publication EurActiv, in an interview where she stated:

We are already building use cases in our laboratories to see how to include it together with our core systems.

She pointed to the trade finance space, an industry where lots of different parties are involved, as a viable, ready use case for blockchain technology.

If you are a European supplier and you are buying silk from China, silk has to be shipped, and you also have letters of credit, and many people are involved in the transaction until the silk arrives to my store. I can see that blockchain could be used in this space because anywhere you got logistic companies, finance companies, suppliers, buyers, all touching the same transaction, that is where having one version of the truth will be very useful.

MasterCard and chieft competitor VISA have markedly made efforts to explore bitcoin and blockchain innovation, besides actively investing in the industry space. As revealed in early 2014, MasterCard had paid lobbyists to focus on Bitcoin.

Serial industry investor Digital Currency Group (DCG) gained the support and investment of MasterCard in late 2015.

In a blog post that deemed 2015 as a year for payments, VISA Europe, in no uncertain terms, underlined bitcoin and blockchain as a reality that the payments industry, ‘has to live with’.

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