Can radical blockchain transparency decrease banking frauds?

During the last week, the Indian financial sector has been gripped by the $1.8 billion fraud at Punjab National Bank (PNB). Fingers have been pointed at bank management, at the auditors and at the regulators, but finger pointing and angry denunciations do not solve problems. We did not solve the problem of unfriendly bank tellers by shouting at them; we solved it using technology (Paul Volcker once remarked that the most important financial innovation that he had seen was the ATM). That is probably the route we must take again: we cannot change human nature, but we can change the technology.

The blockchain technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin has the potential to reduce large banking frauds drastically because it enables radical transparency. Every transaction on Bitcoin is public and you do not even need a Bitcoin wallet to see these transactions. Many websites like https://blockexplorer.com/, https://blockchain.info/, https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC, https://btc.com/, and https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/ allow anybody with a web browser anywhere in the world to see every single transaction as it happens. We can use the same technology to allow the whole world to see every large financing or guarantee transaction (above some threshold like a billion rupees).

The shibboleth of bank secrecy can be discarded for large financing transactions because many of them become public anyway:

• Borrowers disclose a lot of information in their financial statements.
• Many lenders (mutual funds for example) disclose large bond holdings as part of their portfolio disclosures.
• All secured lending is entered in a public register of charges under company law.

We could extend this into a uniform requirement to make large loans public:

• Any large lending (say above a billion rupees) by a financial intermediary.
• Any lending (regardless of size) to a large borrower (say, with aggregate liabilities to the financial sector of over 10 billion rupees).

The natural medium for such a disclosure is the blockchain. The alternative idea of using a credit registry has been an unmitigated disaster (just think of Equifax), and these agencies create more opaqueness than transparency.

If the PNB fraud pushes us to use the blockchain to make finance more transparent and therefore safer, $1.8 billion may end up being a price well worth paying.

Posted at 8:34 pm IST on Tue, 20 Feb 2018         permanent link

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