During the last year, blockchain technology was consolidated in the region driven by the increase in its adoption by financial institutions thanks to the fact that it allows innovation to offer new products and, above all, the guarantee of transparency and security that it offers to users. During the Fintech Americas event held in Miami, Leo Elduayen, CEO & Co-founder of Koibanx analyzed this growth in the adoption of blockchain by traditional banks, with the tokenization of financial assets, in a panel in which spokespersons from various financial entities such as Banco Macro, Serfinsa and Niu . As explained by the executive of the fintech company, a pioneer in providing blockchain infrastructure in Latin America, today blockchain technology has arrived to reduce costs, streamline, improve processes and it is a reality from which millions of users throughout the region are already benefiting.
PRIVATE BANKING IS TOKENIZED
Banco Macro is the largest financial entity in Argentina with more than 500 branches and 4 million customers and is the first private bank in all of LATAM to adopt blockchain technology for its products. Alejandra Rodríguez, Digital Transformation Manager at Banco Macro , shared the entity’s success experience and commented on how this process developed:“Since its launch, we have been analyzing the technology and although at first there was resistance, in blockchain we found a perfect ally, because it gives us all the security and transparency we need. In addition, it gives us agility to be able to quickly develop businesses that we carry out outside the banking core. Together with Koibanx we are developing an app for directed consumption. It is designed to offer our clients a value offer that would come to them from a platform that guarantees security and transparency. What was proposed as a complex development, thanks to Koibanx we were able to easily integrate it even with difficult structures such as those required by banking systems”.The case of El Salvador, with the promulgation of the Bitcoin Law, also highlighted the opportunities for development that blockchain technology has to complement and innovate with new solutions to the new requirements of users and the financial system. In this sense, Serfinsa , is the first LATAM payment processing company, which is working with alternative asset processing hand in hand with Koibanx , the company’s CEO, Leandro Guini, commented on its new developments:
“We are exploring blockchain technology for a very particular use case. Last year we launched the first interoperable digital payment network through QR code called Quick Pay, which allows financial entities of all kinds such as banks, financial cooperatives, digital wallets, fintechs and neo-banks, among others, to your customers can have a simple payment experience in stores. We are now exploring how to deliver promotions to end users by applying blockchain and asset tokenization technology because we found it to be the easiest way. That is, we tokenize a promotion or a voucher and that token has all the characteristics to be used as a means of payment at more than 25,000 points in the Serfinsa network . ”These cases show that blockchain technology goes far beyond the world of cryptocurrencies, as explained by Carlos Miguel, CTO of Niu, the fintech that is revolutionizing the Salvadoran financial market and that has the support of solid entities in the industry such as Banco Cuscatlán and Visa: “Blockchain has great potential, there are many use cases that occur in the banking segment such as loyalty and it has a lot to offer in referral programs.” Alejandra Rodríguez ended by affirming the potential of technology and expanding on the programs that are implemented and developed at Banco Macro :
“We are with a tokenized guarantees project that complements the service we already have, but provides more transparency. In addition, with this Koibanx technology we have radically transformed our Macro Premia rewards system, while before we only assigned points to card purchases, now we can set the rules that we want, for example, promoting the payment of digital services through the app where we reward the user for using it, among many other things.”
