Royal Bank of Scotland Trialing In-House Cryptocurrency

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is experimenting with its own in-house cryptocurrency, says the bank's technology chief.

RBS is a subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, which also includes NatWest and large Irish commercial bank Ulster Bank.

Neil Bellamy, head of technology, media and telecoms, told The Memo that RBS had created, traded and settled its currency between the group's banks.

Commenting on the potential of blockchain technology, Bellamy added:

"It's a pipe dream, but imagine if you could take a distributed ledger system and put it in a back office and do away with a lot of that legacy infrastructure. A lot of people think we're going to be very wary and defensive or shy away from some of this newer cryptocurrency [sic] but I think the actual process and the sentiment behind it could be very exciting."

In the report, Bellamy also said that a cryptocurrency company had used one of RBS' technology solution centres – utilized by businesses to test the viability of their products in a life-like environment – to test their bitcoin distributed ledger technology.

The reports come after RBS's chief administrative officer, Simon McNamara announced that the bank was trialling Ripple technology as part of its £3.5bn technological revamp in June and the bank partnered with distributed ledger startup R3 CEV last month.

RBS image via Nessluop / Shutterstock.com