Billon was awarded 2 million euros from the European Union to build the most advanced DLT document management system in the world

Warsaw / London, May 8 2019. Billon Digital Services sp z o.o, a fully owned subsidiary of Billon Group in the UK, received a grant from the European Commission under Phase 2 of the SME Instrument, part of the Horizon 2020 framework program. The company will receive 1 million 946 thousand euros to complete the build and commercialisation of its B4TDM (Blockchain for Trusted Document Management) solution for global adoption, using a proprietary distributed ledger technology that was designed to deliver the highest system performance metrics in the industry.

The grant covers two years of work to complete all new functionality and to finance initial commercial actions.  During this time, Billon will also have access to coaching, training, networking events, and conferences.

The awarded solution will go beyond simply transforming paper documents to electronic format, and will encrypt and help manage access control rights.  From a storage point of view, publishing documents, such as contracts, invoices or pricings, on a distributed ledger guarantees their immutability and reduces management costs by almost 50%. Beyond storage, the solution is compliant with EU regulations, including GDPR.  Further, initial system tests prove the scalability of the solution, with results proving the ability to publish roughly 5 million documents on DLT daily, a KPI that will likely be exceeded during further development. 

Wojtek Kostrzewa, CEO of Billon Group, comments: - Today’s document management industry has struggled with fulfilling regulatory and customer requirements related to protecting document identity content, and to provide customers with control over data they choose to share or delete.  With the funding from Horizon 2020, Billon will fulfil MIFiD2 and GDPR requirements with innovation that puts a customer in control of their own data and documents. 

The award-winning technology has already been adopted by the Polish Credit Office (BIK). BIK uses an initial version of Billon’s software to provide the Polish banking sector with an electronic document platform that meets the regulatory requirements that electronic documents be stored in a durable medium. First banks will start using the platform for contractual communication with their clients by the end of Q2.

Jacek Pikul, member of the board at Billon Digital Services, comments: - Traditional IT companies typically store copies of documents in databases or in a cloud, and create compressed back-ups which need to be unpacked when there is a need to modify both current and backup systems.   Most blockchain solutions don’t solve this problem, as they only encrypt the time-stamp and location of data, and not the data itself.

Billon’s proprietary DLT system encrypts whole documents on-chain, eliminating the need for expensive servers and backups.  This allows businesses to elegantly delete access to specific data when a customer wants to ‘be forgotten’ as part of GDPR requirements.  As well, it is the only fully regulatory compliant digital alternative to paper, as digital documents can be controlled by users long after a relationship is terminated.

Horizon 2020 is the largest EU R&D program in history, with the budget totalling almost €80B. Billon Digital Services applied for financing under Phase 2 of the SME Instrument as a part of the pilot program of the European Innovation Council, designed for SMEs creating and implementing innovations. In this round of funding, the EC received 1848 applications. Ultimately, 64 projects were selected, most of them in the area of health, engineering and ICT. 

About Billon Digital Services

Billon Digital Services was specifically created to develop trusted document management solutions on the Billon distributed ledger technology (DLT) system, and to manage compliance around customer data management.  Billon Digital Services implements its DLT system in the Polish banking sector together with the Polish credit office, BIK. In 2018, the company won The Europas award for the Hottest Corporate Blockchain Project. In 2019, it received €2M from the European Commission's Horizon 2020 program.

Billon Digital Services is a fully owned subsidiary of Billon Group Ltd.

For more information, visit www.billondigital.com

About Billon:

Billon created the first enterprise DLT system, unifying national currency transactions, document management and identity management into a single architecture. Our mission is to unleash the transformational capabilities of DLT in the regulated world.

Billon went behind the initial principles of blockchain by creating a new protocol for encrypting national currencies within existing regulations. We first solved the challenge of transacting micropayments at scale, and we now can encrypt documents and data 'on-chain' as well. Our high-performance DLT system is designed to deliver tangible business results in Account & Transactions, Trusted Documents, and Identity & Data Sharing.

Billon was founded in the UK in 2015, following several years of R&D in Poland. Its unique DLT protocol has been supported by many R&D grants, including the EU Horizon 2020 program. Billon is licensed to issue electronic money by regulators in the UK and Poland and employs a global team of more than 80 professionals across its offices in London and Warsaw. In November 2018 the company won the world's largest fintech festival in Singapore, organized by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, showcasing a solution to zero-cost blockchain micropayments.

For more information, visit www.billongroup.com

Media contact:

Maciej Józefowicz

Head of PR & Communication

maciej.jozefowicz@billongroup.com 

tel. 0048 734 443 023