Deloitte Digital case study: Ignite innovation

New payment technology is transforming financial systems by allowing direct bank-to-bank settlements in real time, even for international transfers. Blockchain is a buzz and quite a large number of banks are currently working on strategies and POC’s to integrate the technology and protocol with their infrastructure, as well as to define the business models. We wanted to demonstrate, by integrating the Ripple Protocol with the Temenos RetailSuite using the Bluzelle Altitude Gateway, that a Blockchain integration can be a simple and fast.

Solution

To support the integration, Deloitte who is a Temenos global partner, linked up with Bluzelle to develop a POC with the goal of sending cross-currency payments between Temenos RetailSuite instances hosted in the cloud using the Ripple protocol. We used an Agile delivery approach with short development cycles, thus allowing to reduce the delivery risk and to obtain early feedbacks on functionalities. The Bluzelle gateway and the Temenos Integration Framework reduced the integration and development timeline substantially, which was crucial since we only had a couple of weeks to build the POC prior to demonstrating it a the Temenos Community Forum 2016. The overall objective of the Ripple integration is to enable financial institutions to send payments, either in local or foreign currency, in real-time without relying on intermediary banking relationships. This dramatically changes the way international payments are being managed and processed, as Ripple technology reduces fees, transaction times, and the need for liquidity.

Impact

Demonstrating that a Blockchain integration can be achieved in a timely fashion and with a reduced budget, the interest shown by the TCF audience following the POC demo was extensive and Temenos, Bluezelle and Deloitte gained great traction. This has been followed-up since by press releases, with articles in the specialised press and invitations to participate on Blockchain forums and discussions.

Deloitte is pursuing to combine core banking systems with Fintech to open the door for new opportunities and to bring the right players together to show the immense possibilities in this area.