With each passing day, more companies realize that the benefits they could enjoy by applying the renowned blockchain technology far outweigh the potential risks. Most of the enterprises looking to optimize their processes with the approach are, to no one’s surprise, financial institutions and banks.
The latest case is the one of Bank of America. In fact, the bank has proven to be one of the most blockchain-involved companies in the planet, but in the last few days, the American institution filed a patent for blockchain-enabled cash handlers, according to a press release of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO.)
Blockchain is known as the distributed ledger technology, the one that powers not only the most cutting-edge systems in the planet, but also that of Bitcoin and some of the other top altcoins. BoA, as the bank is frequently abbreviated, stated that it would implement the approach with the intention of handling some cash handling devices.
Improving the Cash Deposit and Withdrawal Protocol
The patent’s title is “Banking Systems Controlled by Data Bearing Records,” and it makes use of the word “blockchain” 58 times whilst making it clear that the DLT (Digital Ledger Technology) can optimize and improve the usual cash deposit and withdrawal process.
Traditional cash handling devices are tools that help financial institutions to dispense, count, and track cash flow with the intention of preventing thefts and other things such as lower the management time for oversight of cash drawer. BoA’s patent has an objective: to use what they call a “blockchain distributed database” to maintain a record of transaction made in cash between two parties.
According to the USPTO’s document, the blockchain distributed database is defined as a go-to system to identify deposit items that were received from the previous cash handling machine.
The patent document thinks that blockchain integration is the primary factor behind the cash handling devices’ ability to approve withdrawals and determine cash transportation requirements of other machines in the distributed network.
The document reads that in some embodiments, sending the first transaction information encoded for the blockchain distributed database to the cash handling device support server, may result in the latter generating and sending one or more alerts based on identifying the one or more cash transportation needs of the cash handling machine.
Optimizing the Use of ATMs
Bank of America hopes that, thanks to blockchain technology, they could improve the way that ATMs work. According to the bank, via a statement, “an ATM operator may be responsible for restocking the automated teller machine rather than a particular financial institution. Blockchain technology may be used by automated teller machine to accelerate transaction speed and/or facilitate other types of transactions in addition to ATM transactions like cash withdrawals and deposits, such as gift registry transactions.”
Thanks to blockchain prowess, the bank is also hopeful that their patent can help ATMs to track transactions. Bank of America now has filed over 53 patents involving the use of the technology, but it still lags behind tech giants IBM and e-commerce monster Alibaba.
By Andres Chavez
