Banks want to issue their digital currencies

A few international banks want to issue their digital currencies soon.

According to a recent report, those banks include UBS, BNY Mellon, Deutsche Bank and Banco Santander.

These four banks, also members of the R3 Blockchain Consortium, are working together with ICAP, a UK e-broker and aim at developing a cheaper way to do money transfers using digital currencies.

This banking group didn’t make an official announcement yet, but the new cryptocurrencies are expected to be available in 2018. 

Speaking about the pros of using digital currencies, Banco Santander commented that the traditional banking system makes it hard for banks to cooperate.

To avoid this problem, banks could use the blockchain to transfer funds between wallets within a couple of minutes.

Those banks want to issue their digital currencies to implement the same process that happens through the blockchain into the traditional system.

To do so, they are working to create their cryptocurrencies to be used only within their network and banks will be miners that validate and store transactions on a blockchain.

According to Oliver Wyman, this system can save banks between $65-$80 billion a year.