Known as the world’s ninth largest banking group, Banco Santander recently announced that it will be establishing a unit dubbed “Digital Investment Banking” to dig deeper into the specs of implementing blockchain technology, namely the distributed ledger technology (DLT) into the financial sector. The unit will supposedly be led by John Whelan, who currently serves as Santander’s Director and growing member on several other crypto-based projects.

Santander’s Senior Executive Vice President and Global Head, Jose M. Linares said that the efforts under consideration are ongoing and will be done solely to satisfy banking services for its clients. In particular, he shared that:

“The wave of digitalization that is occurring in the financial industry is accelerating. Our clients expect this to result in better solutions, lower costs and new categories of products and services that enable them to access capital markets more efficiently.”

The combination of blockchain technology and securities transactions appears to be making waves, as it not only reduces fees, but also rids the overall trading experience of intricacies, lack of safety and the obvious, increased wait time. DLT’s role in all this is to eliminate “middlemen”, which in this case would be “third-party individuals”. By doing so, buyers and sellers of securities can directly make exchanges under some agreement.

Santander’s intentions come of no surprise, as the Spanish banking group, has been known for being a first-mover, in several instances, when it comes to cryptocurrencies. An example of this is the bank’s launch of the “One Pay Fx”, an international money transfer service that runs on Ripple [XRP] technology.

According to Cryptovest’s reporting, the bank also partnered with we.trade to complete the first-ever “blockchain-based real-time trade transactions”.

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