Hitachi Establishes Fintech Blockchain Innovation Lab in California
Japanese multinational and global conglomerate Hitachi has revealed its plans to establish a Financial Innovation Laboratory. The new installation will function as a Fintech research organization in Hitachi’s Global Center for Social Innovation at Silicon Valley, California.
In a press release that made the announcement of a new fintech laboratory today, Hitachi revealed that the new organization will work together with the company’s Center of Social Innovation in North America (CSI-NA) specifically in areas of research and development of blockchain technology.
Deeming distributed ledger technology as the “core technology” of Fintech, the new endeavor will look to set upon “collaborative creation” with existing financial institutions.
An excerpt from the release read:
By establishing the Financial Innovation Laboratory in the Silicon Valley, Hitachi will accelerate research & development of blockchain technology, collaborative creation with customers, and development of solutions to support business innovation in financial institutions.
With a note that Fintech combines IT and financial services, Hitachi believes that there is a new trend in the wider international society following the widespread use of smartphones combined with the frenzied development of technologies including cloud, big data and artificial intelligence.
Hitachi has previously set upon its foray into Fintech with the launch of the “Hitachi Mobile Cash Card Service” toward the end of 2015. The feature enables smartphones to be used like payment cards for financial transactions and settlements, in Japan.
Notably, Hitachi is also the board member of the much-publicized Hyperledger Project, the open-source project established and overseen by the Linux Foundation.
At the time of the inception of the Hyperledger Project, president of the financial information systems division at Hitachi, Masayoshi Ogawa stated:
Hitachi would continuously invest our resources and actively support the HyperLedger project. With numerous global organizations backing the effort, we believe blockchain will quickly mature and spread to more industries.
As a company with revenues of $80 billion (2015), Hitachi is only the latest multinational to join the blockchain bandwagon to research and explore distributed ledger technology or blockchain – the underlying technology of Bitcoin – for real world solutions.
Operations at Hitachi’s new Fintech lab is expected to begin in April 2016.
A representative for Hitachi could not be immediately reached for comment at the time of publishing.
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