New Spanish consortium Niuron aims to promote blockchain
New Spanish bank consortium Niuron has been unveiled with the aim to gather knowledge and promote the usage of blockchain technology in the financial sector.
Niuron has been formed by eight banks (Abanca, Bankia, Caixabank, Caixa Ontinyent, Ibercaja, Kutxabank, Liberbank and Unicaja Bank) and led by Cecabank in collaboration with Grant Thornton, an American accountancy firm.
The consortium’s aim is twofold: to generate knowledge about this technology in the technical, legal and business field; as well as the promotion of collaboration projects based on distributed ledger tech (DLT).
Five banks from the consortium (Abanca, Ibercaja, Kutxabank, Liberbank and Unicaja Bank), as well as another company on this occasion, Caja Ingenieros, are developing a project to verify the identity of a person when registering as a client.
This project will allow a client’s digital identity to be shared between different banks, in a GDPR-compliant way. It aims for an increase in speed, savings in costs, a reduction in fraud and operational risk and an improvement in preventing money laundering.
This project is the continuation of the proof of concept stage completed last September, when the founding banks and companies of the consortium endorsed the potential of blockchain technology in transferring clients’ information.
Also in Spain, BBVA and Repsol are working in more blockchain projects. It seems the blockchain fever is catching up across the peninsula.
