Scentre has a market capitalisation of $20 billion and owns 59 Westfield shopping centres across Australia and New Zealand. It has 11,500 tenants, many of whom required bank guarantees to secure leases of between three and six months in its premium shopping centres.

A paper-based guarantee is typically a single sheet of paper with a bank letterhead that is stored in a safe. Among the details it contains are an amount of money the bank is guaranteeing, an expiry date, a customer name, a beneficiary and purpose.

Bank guarantees are amended often and can be forged. They can take anywhere from a day to more than a week to be issued. Experts say there is no way of accurately measuring how many billions of bank guarantees are out there.

'Obvious applications'

Westpac's general manager of corporate and institutional banking Andrew McDonald said a fully digital solution using distributed ledger technology would remove the prospect of fraud and reduce the risks of human error that flow from paper-based processes.

"Next steps involve encouraging all industry players to adopt this technology so we can better protect and save money for our customers. Beyond that there is no reason why this couldn't be applied across other industries," Mr McDonald said.

Participants will release a proof of concept white paper on Monday that will detail how the trial worked. Experts say they need industry-wide support for the initiative to be viable.

ANZ's general manager of wholesale digital banking Nigel Dobson said the group was aiming to run a bigger trial involving multiple landlords before the end of the year. He said the technology has obvious applications in other aspects of commercial property management as well as the insurance industry.


"Think of all the other documents that flow through a retailer and a property manager such as the lease and the insurance and other adjacent documentation. We think there are applications in the insurance industry too," he said.

"There is significant overlap here with the insurance industry if you think about it. They are both paper based, they both get regularly amended and so on. We believe that what we've learned can be picked up and lifted into a broker and insurer scenario, we are looking to kick that off soon."

ANZ drew on its experience working with 28 banks including US banking giant Wells Fargo around using the technology to reconcile payments and potentially disrupt the global payment settlement engine known as Swift.

While hopes are high following the breakthrough, the process of commercialisation will be much more complicated and expensive.

IBM made a dedicated team of researchers and developers available to the project to design, develop, test and deploy the prototype.

Over a period of six weeks the participants were able to prove that the creation, amendment, issuance, validation and reporting of bank guarantees was possible.

IBM Research Australia's vice-president and lab director Dr Joanna Batstone said the potential was enormous.

"The business use case demonstrates the opportunity to lift efficiency and transparency for all parties involved. We believe blockchain can potentially drive productivity across all Australian industries."

Scentre's Mr Bloom said the company aimed to be much more customer focused and had embraced innovation and partnerships.

"We are trying to foster innovation in every aspect of what we do," Mr Bloom said.