Billon’s Distributed Ledger Technology Enables Polish Banks to Go Paperless

The Polish Credit Bureau (BIK) launches a new form of immutable electronic notification document that complies with data regulations 

(London/Warsaw, April 16, 2020) Retail banks in Poland began providing customers with notifications of commissions and fees changes on blockchain via a new document management product offered by the Polish Credit Bureau (BIK, or Biuro Informacji Kredytowej in Polish). Banks use the BIK Blockchain Platform powered by distributed ledger technology (DLT), provided by the British-Polish fintech Billon Group and based on a new type of architecture storing full documents entirely in the blockchain. The aim is to eliminate paper-based client-facing notifications as well as to fully comply with MiFID II, GDPR and related regulations requiring a durable medium for such notifications.

The news comes amidst the growing concern that traditional documentation and delivery methods – including e-mail, internal banking communications and paper delivery – fall short of today’s increased need for security and authentication. Under the new approach, banks’ encrypted notification and legal agreements with clients will be stored on a distributed ledger, accessible via a portal managed by the credit bureau, so that customers can rely on having authentic and immutable documentation that the bank cannot change and which is available even when they are no longer clients of the bank.

• The BIK Blockchain Platform assigns a unique address to every document and distributes the data to many network nodes in a way that provides extremely high database resilience and individual document tamper resistance.
• The platform uniquely stores whole documents within the distributed ledger, including logic and signature. This eliminates the need to maintain expensive and vulnerable additional server storage, which is common for other forms of blockchain.
• The BIK platform can be deployed in sectors outside the banking industry, including storing legal agreements, insurance claims or other high value documents.
•  

BIK began development using Billon’s DLT system in May 2018 and field tested the system in a pilot with a group of five banks. BIK maintains records for over 25 million Poles and dozens of Polish banks.

"This launch marks the first step of commercialisation of the BIK Blockchain Platform. This version eliminates the need for paper notifications. Further versions will focus on streamlining complex multi-party processes and expand to other market sectors in Poland," said BIK CEO Mariusz Cholewa.

"Managing documents on DLT is a much safer and cheaper solution than using paper,” said Wojtek Kostrzewa, CEO of Billon Group. “It is gratifying to see banks as progressive institutions taking advantage of the regulatory compliant ‘civilised blockchain’ solutions Billon developed specifically for regulated industries like these.” 

Learn more about Billon’s Trusted Document Management solution here.

BIK (Biuro Informacji Kredytowej S.A.) collects and provides data on the credit history of bank clients, credit unions, etc. from the entire credit market in Poland. BIK has the largest data collection on individual clients and entrepreneurs, including information on 147 million accounts belonging to 25 million individuals and a credit history of a total of 1.4 million companies, farmers and other entities, including 841 thousand micro-entrepreneurs. Individual clients can monitor their credit history through the online portal www.bik.pl. BIK Alerts service fulfills a social role and protects individuals against credit extortions or delays in repayment.  

Billon unleashed the potential of blockchain by creating efficient and scalable distributed ledger technology (DLT) for business. Billon has developed the initial assumptions of blockchain technology, building a protocol that is extremely fast, fully secure and ready to be used in accordance with existing regulations. We used it at the beginning to save national currencies and micropayments, but we expanded our vision to save documents and data and identity management in a blockchain structure. Thanks to this, Billon has a unique opportunity to provide measurable business benefits to banks, companies and ordinary users in a regulated environment.

Billon was founded in Great Britain in December 2015 on the basis of an earlier research project created in Poland. Its development has been supported by numerous R&D grants, including those from the EU Horizon 2020 framework program. Today, its offices in London and Warsaw employ an international team of over 80 people. The company has a license of an electronic money publisher in Great Britain and Poland.

Billon works to implement its technology commercially with leading business partners, such as FIS in the US and BIK (the Polish credit office) in Poland. In November 2018, the company won the Global FinTech Hackcelerator at the Singapore FinTech Festival, showcasing a solution to zero-cost blockchain micropayments. On October 17, 2019 Billon won the Elevator Lab accelerator, qualifying to the partnership programme by Raiffeisen Bank International to work on e-money transactions with digitised euro on DLT.

Media contacts:

For Europe: Maciej Józefowicz / maciej.jozefowicz@billongroup.com / tel. 0048 734 443 023

For North America: Nancy Broe / nbroe@fulltiltconsulting.com / tel. +1 678 230 9146