Business consultancy Synechron has launched a series of cloud-based blockchain applications to help banks and companies get fast access to the technology.

The so-called “accelerators” include applications for global payments, trade finance, smart margin calls, insurance claims processing, KYC and mortgage financing and processing, and use existing platforms such as Ethereum, Hyperledger, Eris and Ripple.

By being cloud-based and pretty much ready-made, the applications could save smaller banks in particular the time and energy needed to create their own blockchain infrastructure.

Sandeep Kumar, Synechron’s capital markets managing director, explains to GTR: “Synechron’s blockchain accelerators were designed to ‘accelerate’ financial institutions’ time to market for blockchain projects by giving them working, modular code to build on in a sandbox environment. This helps large, global financial institutions working on a number of blockchain projects to quickly stand up a second, third or fourth modular blockchain project to drive forward innovation. This will also help tier two banks and intermediaries to future-proof their business models and to remain competitive.”

The trade finance accelerator uses Ethereum’s Homestead release and the Solidity language for smart contract coding, and allows the creation of digital versions of transactions and smart contracts, centralising collateral information on a distributed ledger across a private network.

The KYC accelerator is built on using the 0.5 released version of HyperLedger Fabric and the Go language for smart contract coding. It is targeted primarily at KYC utilities, credit rating companies, collateral management companies and market data providers.

The global payments application uses Ripple and is leveraged by the trade finance accelerator to execute the payment component of the transaction.

“Our accelerators are production-ready, and we’ve seen considerable interest in them. We’ve already completed custom blockchain development work for clients and feel these accelerators will take them to the next level in their blockchain initiatives,” adds Tim Coates, senior consultant at Synechron.

These solutions are delivered according to two business models: ‘lab for hire’, a time and material option through which Synechron develops custom blockchain for clients, with the possibility to change the scope of the final application; and ‘fixed scope’, a fixed-price delivery of blockchain based on the initial scope stated by the clients.