KNF and KIR team up to develop blockchain in Poland

On August 29, 2019, the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF) and the National Clearing House (KIR) published a joint announcement on their websites about establishing strategic cooperation in the development of Polish fintech infrastructure and supporting innovation on the financial market. As part of the mutual environment defined by KIR and KNF as a sandbox (regulatory sandbox), projects based on distributed register technology – i.e. blockchain – are going to be implemented in particular.

As part of cooperation:

1. KIR shall provide its own blockchain platform, which will be integrated with the Hyperledger node at KNF,
2. KNF and KIR will jointly create solutions supporting payment and financial market entities in meeting regulatory requirements in the field of personal data protection,
3. KNF and KIR will jointly create solutions supporting payment and financial market entities in meeting regulatory requirements in the field of anti-money laundering (AML).

In the opinion of KNF, blockchain technology has significant advantages in the field of data protection, because it allows creating trusted data structures of high quality and transparency, while ensuring their non-repudiation. These features may contribute to improving the quality of reporting of market players supervised by the Polish Financial Supervision Authority, and thus translate into increased quality of supervision.