Not just in Dubai, but it has been an issue all over the world. Checking account holders have battled their cheques being stolen and a lot of money being made away from their accounts. Most times, these fraudulent acts are perpetrated by members of their own family.
Being faced with this challenge frequently a UAE bank, Emirates NBD, decides to offer a permanent solution to make cheque-related fraud more difficult to carry out, or utterly impossible.
Emirates NBD Future Lab, an arm of the bank announced it was rolling out this technology, called Cheque Chain, for the benefit of account holders all across the UAE and not just the bank alone.
The technology was put in place to register all cheque leaves across the country. With every leaf registered, it will, therefore, be able to figure out forged cheques to real ones. It is also going to strengthen the standard the banking sector across the nation.
Hence, every cheque leaf would have its unique Quick Response (QR) code which identifies explicitly every issued cheque on the blockchain. Once a cheque is issued and waiting to be cleared, bank staffs can verify its authenticity before transactions are complete.
Abdulla Qassem, who happens to be the group chief operating officer at Emirates NBD in a statement said:
“Emirates NBD is committed to exploring commercial uses for this innovative technology. After a successful pilot phase, we are pleased to roll out Cheque Chain to our customers nationwide, becoming the first bank in the region to offer this service.”
Going further, he said:
“This initiative will significantly strengthen our risk and security management processes, particularly through the reduction of cheque fraud.”
In just one month of operations, the bank has already registered over 1 million leaves on its blockchain platform. But in a bid to making the banking sector standout, the bank is giving access to other UAE financial banks to make use of the platform as well.
This plot is to bring fraud of this nature to its lowest rate or even entirely eradicate such occurrence in future.
UAE bank customers can now be at ease anywhere they go knowing cheque-frauds and not easy to combat, and the perpetrators of such acts brought to book. Though this is just starting up with only a bank, shortly, we should see more UAE banks integrating this platform with their operations to deliver a better service to their clients.
