ABN Amro Clearing services is to offer a blockchain-based alternative to escrow accounts for money-management organisations that need to segregate and lock up client funds during the course of a transaction.
The Dutch banks says that running funds over a distributed ledger drastically reduces administrative costs for organisations that manage client funds - such as brokers, exchanges, pension funds, notaries, and product service providers - by eliminating escrow account management costs. With the new service, every individual client of the non-bank organisation gets a bank account with the ABN Amro Clearing Bank (AACB) via a permissioned blockchain.
The first client to use the service is white label stock exchange Nxchange, which operates a platform where companies and financial institutions issue and trade equity and bonds.
Nxchange CEO Marleen Evertsz, says: “We can't wait to get started on this cooperation. The solution simplifies the way investors can invest in businesses and other issuers. Block chain technology also offers a wider future perspective to facilitate transactions in multiple asset categories in distributed networks.”
Nxchange will operate as a guinea pig to test the new service before it is released more widely, says AACB's Jan Bart de Boer. "The next step is to jointly check and assess the new functionality and to make improvements where necessary," he says. "After that, the service can be made more widely available. We're seeing a great deal of market interest for this service.”