Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, the largest bank in Japan, and Japanese company Hitachi are teaming up to start a proof-of-concept for a blockchain-based system to digitalize cheques and possibly the rest of the banking. The system will be used for issuing, transferring and collecting digital cheques. The bank will be issuing the cheques while Hitachi Group companies in Singapore will be collecting and depositing the funds. With the proof-of-concept, both the companies hope that they can find any issues or flaws with the system before continuing to develop it. A press release in this regard stated that the Monetary Authority of Singapore has recently released a consultation paper on proposed guidelines for a regulatory sandbox framework to facilitate the advancement of fintech services and in this framework, this POC testing aims to identify issues for practical use, issuing and settling cheques by blockchain technology on a system developed by Hitachi Asia, it added. There are other banks like UBS, Deutsche, Citi and Goldman Sachs, which are all reported to be developing blockchain technology for banking.
