Part of General motors joins the blockchain startup to improve data security

According to a press release made on 11th February, GM Financial, the part of the United States automotive giant General Motors and which provides various services that include leasing, financing, and lending products to GM customers and dealerships, has declared that they have collaborated with the blockchain startup Spring Labs to improve data security.

The startup had generated funding of around $15 million in a seed round last spring. Spring Labs (Springcoin Inc.) is a technology company that creates the Spring Protocol, a blockchain-based network which allows network participants to share important information without sharing essential source data. The process of Spring Protocol would facilitate secure exchange of identity, fraud, and risk information between financial institutions and hence would be able to deliver an additional efficient, transparent, and secure ecosystem for consumer financial data than what it exists in the current scenario.

The auto lender would link with the Spring Founding Industry Partners Program to work with Spring Labs to develops its blockchain products which are expected to be introduced in the first half of the current year.

Adam Jiwan, Spring Labs CEO, talking about such collaboration stated that “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.”

Jiwan expressed positive attitude regarding the upcoming partnership in the near future and said that “We are excited to partner with GM Financial to create solutions on our developing network to address vexing economic problems such as identity fraud. We look forward to announcing additional significant partnerships in due course.”

However, this is not the first attempt in which GM has put down its efforts with respect to the blockchain. The company had, during the end of 2017, collaborated with Hyperledger which is a group working to develop open-source blockchain technologies for businesses which also includes IBM, J.P. Morgan, and FedEx as their members.

Mike Kanarios, GM Financial Chief Strategy Officer, stated that the collaboration with that of Spring Labs is an ongoing activity as GM would continue to put their efforts in the blockchain field. He further, “We believe that they have the most momentum in this space.”

Kanarios also stated during a press release that, “As the captive finance arm for General Motors and one of the world’s largest auto finance providers, we are continually innovating and evolving our fraud prevention and detection capabilities to better serve and protect our customers and dealers. Today’s announcement underscores our commitment and investment to advance these efforts, and we are pleased to collaborate with Spring Labs as a member of the SFIP program.”

The startup is focusing on developing a protocol that would enable companies to securely exchange and verify confidential information, for instance, a customer’s credit history. Jiwan stated that the introduction of such process would assist both lending and non-lending institutions to share the confidential and critical information that they have generated without hampering customer secrecy thereby making it easier for all of them to recognize fraudulent players.