Shinhan Bank (KRX: 055550), the leading bank in South Korea, has joined the Hedera Governing Council, the body that oversees distributed governance of the Hedera network.
Shinhan Bank is a leader in leveraging distributed ledger technology (DLT) to drive financial innovation. In January of this year, Shinhan invested in Korea Digital Asset Custody (KDAC), an industry consortium of businesses that provide digital-asset custody service. In March, Shinhan completed a demonstration platform for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), together with LG CNS.
Officials at Shinhan Bank said, “Our clients and partners are increasingly interested in the benefits that digital transformation can provide for improving the efficiency and security of financial systems. Hedera’s public distributed ledger in particular is uniquely suited to meet the needs of a widely-used fintech service that must be fast, fair, secure, and enable the controls and visibility required by service providers. We are excited to join the Hedera Governing Council to continue to work with leading global organizations in diverse industries on solutions that will underpin the next generation of finance.”
With the Hedera network acting as the underlying infrastructure, Shinhan Bank is expected to increase the efficiency of its internal processes. Since 2017, Shinhan has built various services, including Policy Loan, Pension Fund and Interest Rate Swap deals, on the Hyperledger Fabric private blockchain. Now, as many fintech services begin to operate on public DLTs, Shinhan hopes its innovation in banking services can be continued and accelerated by building more services on the Hedera public distributed ledger.
In March, another council member, IBM, announced the IBM Blockchain Platform Tech Preview with Hedera Hashgraph, representing a step towards increased interoperability for enterprise blockchain networks looking for the transparency of public ledgers, but the privacy of permissioned networks. The Tech Preview demonstrates the importance and value of public consensus derived from the use of the Hedera Consensus Service working on top of the IBM Blockchain Platform built on top of Hyperledger Fabric for permissioned transaction processing. The combination allows organizations of all kinds, including financial services firms, to take accountability, auditability, and trust to the next level.
Mance Harmon, CEO and co-founder of Hedera Hashgraph, said, “We see increased interest from financial institutions and governments worldwide in DLT-based financial services for a number of reasons, including increasing the safety and efficiency of wholesale and retail payment systems, facilitating round-the-clock global settlements, enabling a cashless society, providing a more trusted system than private e-money, and helping in the financial inclusion of the bank-less population. We are thrilled that Shinhan Bank has joined the Hedera Governing Council, and look forward to working with them to be on the leading edge of the future of finance.”