IBM and the French Crédit Mutuel Arkéa recently launched the completion of a blockchain project that helps the bank verifying customer identities and remain compliant with KYC (Know Your Customer) requirements.

In contrast to common, transaction-focused use cases for blockchain implementations, the focus in that case is on having a tamper-resistant, time-stamped ledger that supports the bank in identifying their 3.6 million customers. Customers, even more in banks with a lot of branch offices, have a variety of systems for managing customer identities.

With the blockchain implementation based on IBM technology and the open-source Hyperledger project, the bank has realized a solution that federates information from various existing banking systems and delivers a (logically) centralized ledger that supports the consistency, traceability, and privacy requirements.

Blockchains are by nature ideal for such use cases, given that they create a tamper-resistant, time-stamped, and distributed ledger. In that implementation, a permissioned ledger is used, given that it is a bank-internal project that does not have to deal with specific requirements for anonymous users and public use cases such as e.g. the Bitcoin-Blockchain.

The ledger provides all information about e.g. all relevant identifying documents customers have signed with the bank. Thus, customers don’t need to re-sign when using other services or in different branch offices – plus the advantage, that the bank has a unique view on the customer, which is relevant from both a compliance and a customer service perspective.

The project has been implemented in rather short time. From my perspective, it is a great example for the breadth of use cases blockchains can serve. Blockchain will increasingly become a standard infrastructure element, as e.g. relational databases are today. This is greatly demonstrated by that particular project. Crédit Mutuel Arkéa has further plans for expanding the capabilities, e.g. by providing verification services to 3rd parties.

I strongly recommend analyzing the potential of blockchains for your business. There are many interesting use cases in virtually every industry. Blockchains will not solve everything, and it needs a thorough understanding of blockchain technology to identify the right blockchain type with the appropriate consensus model, depending on use cases and specific requirements. But clearly, there are far more use cases for blockchains than just cryptocurrency and smart contracts. Start analyzing the business potential of blockchains now. There is plenty of KuppingerCole research available, with a number of new reports to be published within the next few days – and you also can rely on KuppingerCole advisory services when starting to look at blockchains.