GM Financial Partners with Spring Labs on Blockchain Tech

Via a statement released earlier today, GM Financial— an operational wing of General Motors that provides customers with products related to finance and lending— is all set to partner-up with blockchain-based startup ‘Spring Labs’.

To elaborate further on the aforementioned deal, this latest collaboration has already been successful in raising a whopping $15 million via a seed round that took place last spring.

Through this latest partnership, GM Financial will work with Spring Labs so as to devise a host of unique blockchain products and offerings that will most likely enter the market by the end of June 2019.

On the matter, Spring Labs CEO Adam Jiwan was recently quoted as saying:

“We came together with the view that we could develop a series of use cases that would match some of [GM Financial’s] core business priorities as a lender, or potentially [those of] GM as a parent company,”

It is worth remembering that this is not the first time GM has forayed into the world of blockchain. For example, in 2017, the firm became part of the Hyperledger group in order to foster/ create open-source blockchain technologies for businesses such as IBM, FedEx etc.

Further elaborating on the motive behind their latest partnership, GM Financial Chief Strategy Officer Mike Kanarios, went on record to state that this aforementioned deal is a natural fit for the firm— especially since GM has been looking to explore this space for quite some time now.

In regards to the subject, Kanarios was quoted as saying:

“We believe that they [Spring Labs] have the most momentum in this space,”

Spring Labs is looking to devise an all-new protocol that will help streamline the exchange of data between various companies.

According to Jiwan, this latest tech offering will help lending as well as non-lending institutions to “share information about customer identities without compromising their privacy” in a completely hassle-free manner.

Not only that, owing to its host of pre-built security modules, the new protocol will make it easier for network agents to easily track and identify fraudulent actors.

Echoing a similar sentiment, Kanarios too is of the opinion that Spring Labs’ new protocol could help GM Financial eliminate the issue of “synthetic identity fraud” from its very root. For those of our readers who may not be aware, synthetic identity fraud usually takes place when a miscreant makes use of both real and fake identification information in order to devise a new online persona.

To be a bit more specific, such cases of fraud have been known to cost GM Financial millions of dollars per year. Thus, in Kanarios’ opinion, an all-new blockchain-based identity verification program could help in making the firm’s native lending processes faster, cheaper and much more secure.

Lastly, it is estimated that Spring Labs’ upcoming offering could also be used by lenders from a variety of different industries— since its scale expands beyond the auto sector and can be used for things like recording registries, establishing payments systems for shared vehicle contracts.

In rounding off this article, it is worth mentioning that David Treat, a managing director and global blockchain lead at Accenture, believes that a marriage between the automotive market and blockchain sector could prove to be extremely healthy for the global economy (as we move into the future).

While some hurdles still exist before blockchain enters the mainstream, it is quite heartening to see that a whole host of big-name companies have started to make use of this technology on quite an elaborate scale.

On the matter, Treat was recently quoted as saying:

“Of course there are…challenges with it,” he says, “but it's one of those things that we wanted to get involved in to make sure that we took advantage of the technology.”

168 +