Innovate Finance to Open Blockchain Lab with Hartree Centre

Innovate Finance will join forces with Hartree Centre to open a lab dedicated to blockchain research, with the aim of bringing it closer to adoption by financial services companies.

Innovate Finance is a London-based independent, nonprofit organization promoting the advancement of FinTech in the UK. Since launching last year, 120 members have joined.

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The lab is scheduled to open in October. It will attempt to discover new use cases for distributed ledger technology, such as anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) applications. It is hoped that the research will yield uniform standards making the technology feasible across multiple financial institutions.

“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,” said Innovate Finance CEO Lawrence Wintermeyer.

Hartree Centre is a high performance computing and data analytics research facility. It was created by the UK government in collaboration with IBM in 2012.

IBM has already been getting its hands on the blockchain through its ongoing development of the Internet of Things. It has also reportedly been working on a government-backed digital currency system, powered by the blockchain, for which it was reportedly seeking the cooperation of central banks.

London, a global leader in FinTech, has also recently become a hotbed for blockchain innovation. Most recently, UK-based Barclays announced its opening of two blockchain labs. UBS, which unveiled its blockchain lab at Canary Wharf’s Level39 FinTech space earlier this year, recently reported its development of a ‘Utility Settlement Coin’, a prototype for settling transactions among multiple financial institutions.