Lloyds Bank is betting on a future where purchasing a home might be as easy as pushing a button – thanks to an unexpected mashup of blockchain and artificial intelligence.
The bank’s chief executive, Charlie Nunn, told delegates at the Global Banking Summit that a combination of “tokenised deposits” and AI could revolutionise mortgages, conveyancing, payments – in short the whole home-buying chain.
In this vision, a customer’s money would exist on a blockchain – yet still be an actual, regulated deposit.
The money could then be mobilized in “smart contracts” to automatically perform tasks such as documentation exchange, property valuation, payment or legal transfer.
Nunn said, this could do much to cut to the quick – and accelerate – the typically excruciating mortgage process.
Insiders say, this is not some far-off dream. The deposit-tokenised system was trialled across the UK and the bank wants to make a fully operational version available by 2027.
Pairing blockchain with A.I. isn’t just about speed – for the bank, it’s an opportunity to reimagine money itself.
By automatically executing the repetitive parts of any given process (like payments or document flows) through smart contracts, and only relying on humans to manage complexity (formerly considered an unpreventable source for human error and red tape), AI models can play a role in these solutions.
It’s an attempt to make financial services feel more like your smartphone, and less like filling out endless forms.
Now, there are a few “ifs,” of course. This sort of tech leap relies heavily on regulatory approval, infrastructure being rolled out not just across the property industry but also the legal and banking sectors – and, most important of all, people actively trusting a blockchain-backed mortgage system.
Will homebuyers, real-estate agents and lawyers get up to speed in time? That remains to be seen.
But if it works – and assuming Lloyds pulls it off, let’s not doubt the rest of the article on account of an anecdote robe! – then perhaps what we are witnessing is a whole new era: one where buying a house is no longer akin to climbing a mountain made out of paperwork, but pressing “buy” inside an app.
