BNP Paribas has opened a 5000 square foot 'Innovation Zone' on the 30th floor of its Manhattan HQ, where it is inviting employees to come and re-imagine the bank.
The Lab has been christened by 200 attendees at a two-day 'Blockchain Bizhackathon', featuring prominent keynote speakers from the bank's portfolio of distributed ledger investments and partnerships, including representatives from R3 CEV, Microsoft and Digital Asset Holdings.
Bruno d'Illiers, deputy head of CIB Americas, functions and COO CIB Americas, says: "With the creation of our new in-house Innovation Lab we want to initiate a dialogue with our clients around blockchain and find new solutions to integrate the technology that will allow BNP Paribas to better serve them."
Artificial intelligence, big data and machine learning are also on the menu for forthcoming programmes, with the bank dividing the workload among six taskforces.
D'illiers says the bank is determined to make the brainstorming space accessible to all 2500 employees in its midtown Manhattan HQ, and not just the usual array of coders and C-suite executives. To this end it is running a concurrent internal 'ideation' campaign to encourage employees to come up with original ideas that can improve customer services and business processes.