The Central Bank of Brazil has established a permissioned ledger for the sharing of data with other national supervisory authorities.
The Information Integration Platform for Regulators (Pier), was developed by the Banco Central do Brasil IT department (Deinf), and will be operational at the end of 2018 following a period of alpha testing.
Pier enables the data exchange between the BCB and other regulators, such as the Superintendence of Private Insurance (Susep), the Securities and Exchange Commission of Brazil (CVM), and the National Pension Funds Authority (Previc).
Initially, connected regulators will use Pier for sharing data regarding the authorisation processes for financial institutions, including information on administrative sanctioning processes, the conduct of financial institutions’ officers, and the corporate control of entities regulated by the BCB.
Aristides Cavalcante, deputy head of Deinf, explains: “Currently there is some exchange of information regarding authorisation processes, which are not automated yet: staff from one of the institutions contact the others by letters or e-mails. Even the few queries that are automated by software still require some degree of human intervention. Staff from the CVM, for instance, may access the information by using the BCB IT system Unicad.”
He says the Bank settled on a blockchain platform because it provides a horizontal network of information-sharing between the regulators connected to Pier.
"Traditional business models of information exchange between several entities require a centralising entity, which ends up exercising a certain degree of operational hierarchical superiority over the remaining ones, which doesn't necessarily reflect the institutional reality," he says. "Furthermore, as the blockchain platform records every data request using cryptographic signatures, it is possible to certify at any moment the authorship, and that no entity has tampered with the data, and thus guaranteeing information authenticity."
At the start, the BCB expects that institutions will allow access to information relative to administrative sanctioning processes, but any participant may grant access to any information considered to be of mutual interest as required.