Retail banks in Poland have begun providing customers with notifications of commissions and fees changes on the blockchain via a new document management product offered by the Polish Credit Bureau (BIK, or Biuro Informacji Kredytowej in Polish).
Banks use the BIK Blockchain Platform powered by distributed ledger technology (DLT), provided by the British-Polish fintech Billon Group and based on a new type of architecture storing full documents entirely in the blockchain. The aim is to eliminate paper-based client-facing notifications as well as to fully comply with MiFID II, GDPR and related regulations requiring a durable medium for such notifications.
The news comes amidst the growing concern that traditional documentation and delivery methods – including e-mail, internal banking communications, and paper delivery – fall short of today’s increased need for security and authentication. Under the new approach, banks’ encrypted notification and legal agreements with clients will be stored on a distributed ledger, accessible via a portal managed by the credit bureau, so that customers can rely on having authentic and immutable documentation that the bank cannot change and which is available even when they are no longer clients of the bank.
- The BIK Blockchain Platform assigns a unique address to every document and distributes the data to many network nodes in a way that provides extremely high database resilience and individual document tamper resistance.
- The platform uniquely stores whole documents within the distributed ledger, including logic and signature. This eliminates the need to maintain expensive and vulnerable additional server storage, which is common for other forms of blockchain.
- The BIK platform can be deployed in sectors outside the banking industry, including storing legal agreements, insurance claims or other high-value documents.
BIK began development using Billon’s DLT system in May 2018 and field-tested the system in a pilot with a group of five banks. BIK maintains records for over 25 million Poles and dozens of Polish banks.
“This launch marks the first step of commercialization of the BIK Blockchain Platform. This version eliminates the need for paper notifications. Further versions will focus on streamlining complex multi-party processes and expand to other market sectors in Poland,” said BIK CEO Mariusz Cholewa.
“Managing documents on DLT is a much safer and cheaper solution than using paper,” said Wojtek Kostrzewa, CEO of Billon Group. “It is gratifying to see banks as progressive institutions taking advantage of the regulatory compliant ‘civilized blockchain’ solutions Billon developed specifically for regulated industries like these.”
Watch a video and learn more about Billon’s Trusted Document Management solution here.
