Toyota Financial Services joined R3CEV LLC’s blockchain consortium in early July, as it seeks to boost efficiency by exploring distributed and shared ledger technology for potential applications in auto financing, said Chris Ballinger, the captive’s chief financial officer and chief officer of strategic innovation.
“There’s a whole lot of middlemen who are behind what seems like a simple transaction,” Ballinger told AFN. Blockchain allows for transactions — such as the transfer of an auto title or lease, or handling of a payment — to be done directly between parties, he explained. “You know that payment exists, and all that can be done because it’s all there in the chain,” he said. “That has potential to ring billions of dollars out of the system, and make it more efficient.”
Blockchain is a public ledger of digital transactions that can be shared among a distributed network of computers; it allows participants on the network to securely manipulate the ledger without the need for a central authority.
TFS is the first captive to collaborate with R3’s network, which includes more than 50 of the largest financial institutions working to develop use cases for blockchain in the financial industry.
