ANZ Bank Exploring Hedera DeFi Services For Its 8.5 Million Customers

Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), one of Australia’s ‘Big Four’ banks, is tapping into the growing demand for decentralised finance (DeFi) via the Hedera Hashgraph testnet.

Speaking as a member of an Australian Blockchain Week panel on DeFi, ANZ’s portfolio lead Nigel Dobson said his bank was exploring how best to offer DeFi services to its 8.5 million customers.

According to Dobson, ANZ was taking a “blockchain agnostic” approach and had already experimented with minting, transacting and burning tokens on the Hedera Hashgraph testnet.

All Part of ANZ’s Sustainability Plan

With Bitcoin and Ethereum often criticised for their high carbon emissions, Hedera Hashgraph’s lower-carbon imprint fits with ANZ’s stated goals to be a more ecologically responsible bank:

With Hashgraph able to run Solidity smart contracts, existing smart contracts and applications on Ethereum could be ported over to Hashgraph to the advantage of a potential DeFi ecosystem.

ANZ’s Targets to 2025

On the subject of sustainability, ANZ has already set targets to:

• fund and facilitate at least A$50 billion by 2025 towards sustainable solutions for its customers;
• engage with 100 of its largest emitting business customers to encourage them to strengthen their carbon transition plans and enhance their efforts to protect biodiversity by the end of 2024;
• develop an enhanced climate risk management framework that strengthens ANZ’s governance and is responsive to climate change, by the end of 2022; and
• achieve ANZ’s 2021-2025 suite of environmental footprint targets.

Set the Course for DeFi

Last November, Dobson described competitor CommBank’s pacesetting move into the Australian crypto space as “bold”, suggesting it was just the start of a major shift in the financial system and something traditional finance would need to embrace or adapt to.

“We are moving to a more decentralised system that can generate new outcomes and business models that can’t be ignored,” Dobson said at the time. “The power of decentralised networks transcends all companies – you just need to choose whether to be part of it or ignore it … I think we have a much stronger bias to participate than ignore.”