Gov’t Funded Blockchain Lab to Open in the UK

A Blockchain lab is scheduled to launch in the UK next month as a result of Innovate Finance teaming up with Hartree Centre to explore the opportunities offered by blockchain technology.

Innovate Finance is an independent membership association started in August 2014 to develop the global financial technology sector and has more than 100 members including Barclays, HSBC, Silicon Valley Bank, Nutmeg, Zopa, Monitise, Transferwise, Azimo, Syndicate Room, Ratesetter, Prophis Technologies, and GoCoin.

Hartree Centre is a data analytics research facility that has received 37.5 million GBP in seed funding from the UK government. Founded in 2012, it offers new opportunities for problem solving, forecasting and analysis using a high-performance computing. Moreover, Hartree Centre also works side-by-side with 24 researchers from IBM at the Sci-Tech Daresbury to develop new tools, algorithms and approaches to Big Data.

“This is a formidable partnership built on expertise and a hunger to develop innovations that can have a meaningful and sustainable impact on the financial services sector and the UK economy,” explained David Moss, Advanced Technology Solutions Manager at the Hartree Centre. “The Hartree Centre is very excited about this new initiative and look forward to working closely with Innovate Finance members to learn from the knowledge they bring and to harness the power of our world class computing systems.”

He added:

“Together we will examine how blockchain technology can shape a new and better future for financial services and possibly other sectors too.”

These organizations will work together on improving financial sector technologies using the blockchain, particularly to enforce anti-money laundering (AML) and Know-Your-Customer (KYC) policies as well as to facilitate mass adoption.

Lawrence Wintermeyer, CEO of Innovate Finance said:

“We are excited about the prospect of our members openly collaborating to deliver use cases to the wider community. If we can use the lab to develop open standards for the blockchain in financial services, we will be moving one step closer to accelerating the mass adoption of this breakthrough technology.”