UK Pension and Welfare Agency Is Looking Into Blockchain For Future Implementation

On August 9th in a blog post, the deputy director of digital payments and banking systems at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) made a statement that the DWP was looking for ways to revamp its payment systems in order to make them better adapted to the current economic situation in the country.

Richard LAYCOCK said that implementing the blockchain would bring great benefit to the speed, efficiency, and cost of conducting millions of transactions every single day while also saving the data on comprehensive ledgers for lawmakers to study.

It’s likely that the DWP will indeed implement the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) sometime this year and base it on local banks’ attempts at trying out the blockchain technology.

This news comes in the wake of the HMRC requesting customer trading information from UK crypto exchanges such as Coinbase, CEX.IO, and eToro which are just now starting to comply. This could be the DWP’s method of streamlining the taxing process of all pension funds and saving costs on things like data collection and etc.

The only other option that Laycock has considered was open banking which could also play the role of an influencer for the payment systems all over the world, but as it stands right now, the blog seems to be focusing on the blockchain specifically.

Image courtesy of Independent