EastNets, a leading provider of compliance, payment and cloud solutions and Dow Jones Risk & Compliance, a global provider of third party risk management and regulatory compliance solutions, have completed a Proof of Concept (POC) to provide organizations with near real-time updates of watchlists over blockchain.

The POC for this new blockchain network, which was conducted for a leading UK-based financial institution, achieved higher levels of accuracy and security in the watchlist update activity, and consequently, in the watchlist screening process as a whole.

As part of the POC, Dow Jones Risk & Compliance developed a higher frequency feed of watchlist updates. Once integrated, Dow Jones’ high quality, structured third party risk data can be published via EastNets’ blockchain network. This technology enables all EastNets SafeWatch Filtering installations, and therefore the lists for all business units of financial institutions using the network, to be updated in near real-time.

HyperLedger Fabric Blockchain was used in the POC to provide an enterprise level private-permissioned and strict-accessed ledger, to support selective data distribution and scalability.

"The new blockchain network automates list updates and eliminates manual processes, thus providing higher security by making the updates tamper-proof. Making Dow Jones’ watchlist updates available to organizations using en.SafeWatch Filtering also eliminates lengthy update processes, while giving customers using the network the assurance of world-class data and low false positive rates,” said Hazem Mulhim, CEO EastNets.

Guy Harrison, Managing Director, Dow Jones Risk & Compliance, said: "The combination of blockchain technology and high quality, structured data has the potential to significantly enhance the speed, accuracy and security of financial institutions’ watchlist screening. The success of this POC is clear evidence of that, and we look forward to further deepening our partnership with EastNets in this field.”

Customers who join the network will be able to carry out integrity checks to ensure that updates to the blockchain network have been properly reflected to their en.SafeWatch Filtering solution thus benefiting from the high speed, security and non-repudiation that the service will offer.

EastNets is targeting Q1 2019 as a go-live date for rolling out the new blockchain network.