Infosys Subsidiary Launches Blockchain Platform for Banks

Infosys will become the latest IT services giant to announce the introduction of a blockchain offering through its EdgeVerve Systems subsidiary today at its Infosys Confluence conference in San Francisco.

Called the EdgeVerve Blockchain Framework, the product is aimed at furthering the adoption of blockchain tech in the financial services sector. Built on a permissioned distributed ledger, Infosys said the product will allow banks to "rapidly deploy" blockchain services, among other benefits.

In promotional materials, EdgeVerve described the distributed ledger platform as asset-agnostic, highly extensible and best suited for “minimizing operating and per-transaction costs for financial services”.

The company continued:

"Designed specifically for the banking sector, it can scale to the levels needed to support international, cross-border transactional business. These capabilities make applications built on this framework a viable platform to run payments and other high volume transactional banking services."

Andy Dey, president of customer and operations at EdgeVerve, said the company will now invest resources at a research facility in Ireland toward the project, and begin working to leverage it with “several” unnamed institutional partners.

EdgeVerve said it is already working on proofs-of-concept centered on digital vaults, invoice processing, payments, smart contracts, syndicated loans and trade finance.

The announcement comes weeks after Infosys first went public with its thesis on the technology. At the time, domain leaders at the company argued they believe that, despite claims to the contrary, blockchain systems will begin to impact finance in the next few years.

With the platform, Infosys joins Microsoft, IBM and Red Hat as one of a growing number of IT giants seeking to garner business in the now burgeoning market for enterprise blockchain solutions.