Bank of America CTO Catherine Bessant: We Haven’t Found a Blockchain Use Case in Finance

Catherine Bessant, chief technology officer at Bank of America, admitted that the institution has yet to find blockchain use cases for the financial services sector. Bessant made her comments during an interview with Bloomberg published on May 14.

Speaking to Bloomberg, Bessant said that — while she believes this technology to hold a lot of potential — blockchain is “full of sound and fury, yet to signify something.” Still, she noted that she believes blockchain has practical applications:

“I believe that there are use cases that makes sense today, we have yet to find them at scale in financial services. We’re experimenting heavily, we have more patents than any other financial institution in the blockchain space, but have yet to find something that makes a difference for our clients or our customer.”

The views expressed by Bessant are seemingly in contrast with what she said in March, when she told CNBC that she is privately bearish on blockchain despite the bank holding more patents than any other financial institution.

According to Crunchbase, Bank of America has an estimated revenue of $91.1 billion and is one of the world’s largest financial institutions, serving approximately 51 million consumers and small business relationships.

As Cointelegraph reported earlier this week, British financial software firm Finastra has signed three global banks on its R3 Corda blockchain-based syndicated loans platform.