The Polish Credit Office (BIK) has announced that it will be moving up to 140 million credit records to Blockchain in what is seen as a significant development in the use of Blockchain for secure document management.
Billon and the Polish Credit Office, the largest credit bureau in Central and Eastern Europe will implement the new secure document management system. Billion says its offering is fully-GDPR compliant and is designed to offer total visibility, trackable history and full data integrity for any client-facing document including banking records, loan agreements, insurance claims, telephone bills and terms & conditions.
Poland's largest banks jointly own BIK and the new implementation will see around 24 million consumers and one million businesses in Poland make use of the new document management system in Blockchain. The system has been jointly developed and is believed to be the first example of a system being used to store and keep highly sensitive information such as credit records safe for secure access. Each month roughly 150 million documents will be processed using the system.
BIK and Billon developed the solution for what it describes as, durable medium of information, as defined by EU regulations and directives such as MIFID II and IDD directives. The partnership saw eight Polish banks participating in trials which established that the system could publish the figure of 150 million documents every month. This is described as more than sufficient for even the largest institutions to move to paperless customer service.
In a press statement Andrzej Horoszczak, CEO of Billon explained: "Our partnership is the start of a true revolution in information management. It is now possible to move away from the constraints of closed central databases to a democratic blockchain-based Internet where every user will be able to control their identity". This solution is claimed to provide the world's first GDPR-compliant blockchain platform, intended to streamline customer service processes and implement customer rights such as the "right to be forgotten".
Horoszczak adds: “We're fixing the problem of consumer data control, creating a level playing field between individuals and corporations. The benefits could affect more than the financial sector, and we anticipate it will soon be adopted by industries such as telecommunications, insurance and utilities. Our cooperation is only the first step to introducing mass blockchain technology use for trusted document management."
Sarb Sembhi, CISO at Virtually Informed, commented “This is probably the first of many widescale uses of blockchain in banking, when organisation improve any key aspect of security, what tends to happen is that criminals focus on other aspects not related to that technology until such time that enough research is able to break the technology (blockchain), the focus will be on other vulnerabilities.
"So, although the use of blockchain may improve security on the one hand, unless the Bank, or anyone else pursuing this strategy has invested appropriately in all other controls using a risk-based approach, they may find that they still get breached. Criminals usually don't like to use valuable technology exploits (whenever they become available) while they are still able exploit non-technical controls, which are usually the human controls."
