Japan's Mizuho says it has successfully completed trials that used distributed ledger technology for cross-border document sharing and a custom digital currency.
The banking group first outlined plans to work with US firm Cognizant on the document sharing initiative a year ago in an effort to minimise counterparty risks, speed up settlements, improve contractual performance, and enhance regulatory reporting.
Mizuho says that the experiment successfully confirmed that a tamper-proof distributed database can be used to create an effective platform for information sharing among multiple group companies, offering cost savings and better usability.
Meanwhile, a second test allowed group subsidiaries to both issue a digital currency based on their performance, and freely transfer that currency to other subsidiaries, eliminating the need for data reconciliation among them.
Mizuho says it will now explore the use of blockchain to address the need to store and manage large volumes of data as it seeks to cement its place as an early adopter of the technology. It is a member of the R3 consortium and earlier this month invested in bitcoin exchange bitFlyer.