The Hindu: Cognizant’s Senior Vice President of Banking and Financial Services Says Blockchain Presents an Opportunity for Business Processes to Work More Efficiently

“Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have been making a lot of buzz over the last few years and we have been continuously monitoring their development and impact on the financial services world,” says Jaideep Poondir. “We have been rigorously working on exploring the potential applications of blockchain technology and experimenting on it at our Banking and Financial Services Digital Works Lab.” Excerpts:

“We help our clients become digital enterprises. In this endeavor, blockchain presents an opportunity to rethink how various business processes might work more efficiently going forward. Our vision is to enable our clients to identify and incorporate a decentralized architecture, wherever applicable, to cut costs and develop new growth opportunities using distributed ledger technologies.

Blockchain is increasingly drawing attention around the world for building new work processes to make transactions and digital interactions more secure, transparent, efficient and cost-effective, thereby delivering superior experience to customers. Blockchain offers many use cases in financial institutions, particularly in improving existing processes and reducing the time and risk involved in transactions.

Blockchain, maintained by a network of distributed independent communicating devices, offers a single source of truth for financial and non-financial transactions without any trusted central authority. It holds significant promise in helping financial services organizations minimize counterparty risks, speed up settlements, improve contractual performance, and enhance regulatory reporting.

The fact that blockchain’s distributed database is verified by a network of nodes and continuously grows based on the previous data records, makes it very hard to be tampered with.

At Cognizant, we are making focused investments to strengthen our blockchain capabilities, develop innovative digital frameworks and building blocks to harness distributed ledgers, and build a world-class alliance ecosystem. We are collaborating with some of the world’s leading financial services organizations, including various consortia that these firms are forming, to help build out our capabilities in blockchain technology.

We have developed several blockchain and cryptocurrency accelerators in the areas of P2P payments, asset trading, document storage, identity management, and lending, merchant and other financial transactions.

Cross-border payment and remittances, post-trade settlement, syndicated loans, and trade finance are some of the other areas that many financial services firms are exploring worldwide.”

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