The French multinational investment banking and insurance provider, AXA has become the latest international financial giant to embrace bitcoin. According to recent reports, AXA is exploring ways to integrate the well-known digital currency into its remittance services.
Bitcoin offers a very efficient, secure and inexpensive way to transfer funds across borders. Bitcoin transactions are faster than most of the regular fund transfer channels currently available out there. People can send bitcoin to any place across the world in less than a couple of hours. All transactions happening over the bitcoin network is stored in a public ledger called blockchain. Banking and financial organizations dealing with fiat currency do not have such options at the moment and they have to use SWIFT or other alternative regular channels. There are also costs involved in maintaining and transmitting funds over these conventional networks.
Bitcoin has been gaining a lot of popularity lately. The rise of bitcoin adoption has started forcing banks to innovate and come up with better solutions for their customers. A recent study conducted by Santander group has also concluded that banks can save millions of dollars on operational and compliance expenses over a period of time by incorporating bitcoin and blockchain technology into their daily operations.
Most of the leading banks in the world have already started working on finding ways to incorporate the technology behind bitcoin and other digital currencies into their daily operations. AXA is now one among those.
According to a representative of AXA Strategic Ventures, the company’s VC fund arm along with AXA Factory accelerator are currently considering bitcoin and blockchain technology adoption as an investment thesis that can be potentially implemented across the company’s remittance, insurance, real estate, wealth management, intellectual property management and other portfolios. AXA has also announced the launch of its new accelerator “Kamet” focusing on technology innovations in the insurance segment.