BCI in Collaboration with IBM Advances Blockchain based Financial Services with Electronic Letter of Guarantee for Clients in Thailand

$1.6B USD in government savings bonds were successfully sold within a week of launch BANGKOK, Thailand, Oct. 5, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- SIBOS -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Bank of Thailand (BOT), the central bank, has successfully launched the world's first blockchain-based platform for government savings bonds issuing a total of $1.6B USD within two weeks. Leveraging blockchain technology on the highly secured IBM Cloud, the platform allows investors to benefit from speedy bond issuance, reducing a process that previously took 15 days to two days. The efficiency provided by blockchain also reduces operational complexity and the overall cost of issuing bonds. According to The Thai Bond Market Association, the outstanding Thai bond market stood at $421B USD as of December 2019. Government bonds dominate the Thai market, with outstanding value of $157B USD in 2019 1, accounting for 37% of the total outstanding Thai bond market. In the past, the sale of government savings bonds was a complex, multiparty, time-consuming process that relied on a non-real-time system, with duplicated validation steps and manual reconciliation prone to data errors. As blockchain technology streamlines the processes of bond issuance for issuers, underwriters, registrars, investors and key ecosystem participants, the government savings bond platform now becomes an immutable, real-time single source of truth for network participants, which minimizes the redundant validation and reduces the costs of reconciliation. In addition, Thai investors can now purchase bonds up to the maximum value of their individual allocated quota from a single bank. The effort to develop a secure and efficient government bond infrastructure involved collaboration among eight institutions including BOT, Public Debt Management Office, Thailand Securities Depository Co., Ltd, Thai Bond Market Association and selling-agent banks, including Bangkok Bank, Krungthai Bank, Kasikorn Bank, and Siam Commercial Bank, with IBM Blockchain as technology and cloud platform partner. The benefits and business value of using blockchain technology for government bond distribution is shared across stakeholders, and include faster bond issuance for investors, decreased workloads and processing time for issuers, underwriters and registrars, as well as greater transparency and reduced operating costs across the entire value chain. "Bank of Thailand's success with the government savings bond project is the latest example of how blockchain technology can redefine the way businesses operate by simplifying complex processes resulting in fast, transparent, secured and efficient multiparty collaboration," said Patama Chantaruck, VP for Indochina Expansion and MD of IBM Thailand. "IBM is proud to bring our world-class blockchain platform and IBM Cloud to support Bank of Thailand, and work side-by-side with them in achieving this important milestone for Thailand's financial industry." Bank of Thailand now plans to extend blockchain to all other government bonds targeting both retail and wholesale investors. Thailand is an active adopter of blockchain technology, with a dynamic ecosystem extending to both public and private spheres. In 2019, the electronic letter of guarantee (eLG) platform and network participated in by 22 Thai banks and 15 companies successfully went live and currently handles approximately $300M USD in guarantee letters. Thai Customs Department also became the second government agency in southeast Asia to use TradeLens, a blockchain-based global trade digitization platform that improves the speed, accuracy and security of local and international shipping activities. More pilots and applications of blockchain are also being rolled out to bring transparency and efficiency to finance, insurance, government and other sectors. 1Size of Thai Financial Markets , Issuance of Domestic Bonds , Outstanding Value of Domestic Bonds http://www.thaibma.or.th/EN/Market/SummaryStatistics.aspx About IBM BlockchainIBM is recognized as the leading enterprise blockchain provider. The company's research, technical and business experts have broken barriers in transaction processing speeds, developed the most advanced cryptography to secure transactions, and are contributing millions of lines of open source code to advance blockchain for businesses. Since 2016, IBM has worked with hundreds of clients across financial services, supply chain, government, retail, digital rights management and healthcare to implement blockchain applications, and operates a number of networks running live and in production. The IBM Blockchain Platform delivers the end-to-end capabilities that clients need to quickly activate and successfully develop, operate, govern and secure their own business networks. IBM is an early member of Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. For more information about IBM Blockchain, visit https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/ or follow us on Twitter at @ibmblockchain. Media contacts:Paranee ReymondonIBM Thailand Co., Ltd.Tel: +66 2 273 4164  Email: paranee@th.ibm.com SOURCE IBM

IBM and USTA bring tournament to life with virtual sports debates and hyper-relevant match insights using IBM Watson, underpinned by an open hybrid cloud architecture FLUSHING, N.Y., Aug. 28, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM, the digital partner of the United States Tennis Association (USTA) for 29 years, announced today innovative new fan experiences leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) underpinned by hybrid cloud technologies that will enable millions of fans around the world to experience the excitement and vibrant debate surrounding the iconic tennis Grand Slam, the first ever without fans on-site.  Experience the interactive Multichannel News Release here: https://www.multivu.com/players/English/8668652-ibm-creates-new-ai-fan-experiences-for-us-open/ A recent IBM sponsored survey of 2000 U.S. sports fans highlighted the importance of digital experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly half (48%) of sports fans who responded think having an interactive digital experience, (streaming, video content, highlights, stats, etc.) has become more important since the coronavirus outbreak.1 Specifically, younger generations have a greater desire for digital experiences, with Gen Z (64%) and Millennials (61%) saying it has become "more important."  New Fan Experiences, Shift to Fans Everywhere In partnership with the USTA, IBM developed three unique and new tennis-based digital experiences. Two of the new solutions are based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities from IBM Watson, pulling from a variety of data sets and running workloads on multiple clouds. At IBM, NLP is critical to AI for business because it enables interpretation of the trends and insights hidden within large amounts of data - including charts, tables, PDFs, images and more. The new solutions were developed by IBM iX, one of the world's largest digital design agencies, and are available on Official US Open platforms, including USOpen.org and the US Open app. A team of IBM iX experts in design and technology collaborated virtually with the USTA digital team, utilizing the IBM Garage Methodology to co-create the new fan experiences and fast-track their deployment.  The new solutions and the technology powering them include: Open Questions with Watson Discovery: To give fans a way to engage remotely in iconic sports rivalries, IBM will facilitate several debates among fans on USOpen.org. Starting with a question on hot tennis topics such as "Is Billie Jean King the most influential tennis player in history?", IBM will use the NLP capabilities in Watson Discovery to analyze millions of news and sports sources for insights. That unstructured data will be analyzed, summarized and ultimately delivered as pro and con arguments using IBM Research technology. Fans will also be able to share their opinions on the debates, and engage on topics they are passionate about. Match Insights with Watson Discovery: Fans can become instant "experts" about the players and the tournament match-ups with new AI-powered insights ahead of each match. Match Insights with Watson Discovery uses NLP technology to search for and understand millions of articles, blogs and thought leaders leading into a match, to gather the most relevant information. The solution uses Natural Language Generation technology from IBM Research to translate structured data - like statistics from prior matches - into narrative form, so fans can get fact-based insights on the players and their opponents ahead of match play. AI Sounds: Among the challenges the USTA faced this year was how to recreate the sound of fans inside the stadium. IBM leveraged its AI Highlights technology to recreate crowd sounds gleaned from hundreds of hours of video footage captured during last years' tournament. In past years, AI Highlights used Watson to digest video footage and rank the excitement level of each clip to compile a highlight reel in near-real time and classify specific crowd reactions, including the crowd roar, to give each clip a crowd reaction score. This insight will be used this year to dynamically serve up those sounds based on similar play from last year. The AI Sounds tools will be available to the production teams in-stadium and at ESPN. Underpinned by Open Hybrid Cloud The new fan experience solutions pull from a variety of data sets and APIs running on IBM public cloud and on private clouds. To handle the variety of different workloads required, the USTA is using Red Hat OpenShift to enable a seamless experience across multiple public and private clouds. This hybrid cloud architecture gave the USTA's digital operation the flexibility and hyper-scale it needed to quickly embrace remote work while maintaining productivity and ensuring the highest commercial level of data security.2 A hybrid cloud architecture will enable remote operations to function seamlessly.  For example, the USTA statisticians who would normally be courtside, providing stats for each point live, will now be offsite watching each match on low-latency feeds and will still be able to deliver game stats as if they were onsite.  Agile development leads to faster design, testing, deployment On June 17th, just 75 days before the start of match play, the announcement was made to hold the tournament without fans on-site. As the technology partner of the USTA, IBM had less than twelve weeks to conceive, develop, test and deliver new digital experiences for fans. IBM's hybrid cloud architecture with Red Hat OpenShift provided the operational agility and flexibility necessary to quickly develop new experiences powered by IBM Watson's advanced NLP.  "COVID-19 brought disruption to sports as a whole, and the ability of fans to experience live sporting events has been heavily impacted in 2020. At the same time, the pandemic accelerated the need for engaging technologies using AI and underpinned by a scalable hybrid cloud," said Noah Syken, Vice President of Sports & Entertainment Partnerships, IBM. "As the technology partner to the USTA, we transformed our offerings to meet tennis fans where they are this year - experiencing the sport through the US Open digital properties everywhere."  "US Open digital properties will deliver the tournament to millions of fans around the world, and this year, IBM's new digital experiences will bring more data-driven player insight than ever before," said Kirsten Corio, Managing Director, Ticketing, Hospitality and Digital Strategy, USTA. "Our digital properties and interactive fan experiences have led the way in engaging tennis and sports fans, and we know this year that's more important than ever. We've shifted our platforms and experiences to engage with fans everywhere in this new virtual-only environment." The US Open runs from August 31 through September 13. To see the technology in action, visit USOpen.org, or on your mobile device via the US Open app, available in the Apple and Android app stores. CONTACT:Angelena Abate 646-234-8060 Angelena.Abate@IBM.com  1 Morning Consult and IBM Sports and Tech Survey: Survey responses from 2000 US Sports fans. July 20202 The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 140-2 is a U.S. government computer security standard used to approve cryptographic modules. It is issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Level 4 is the highest level of security. SOURCE IBM

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