Lloyds Bank is committed to the futurewhere buying a home can be as easy as pressing a button – thanks to the unexpected combination of blockchain and artificial intelligence.
The bank's chief executive, Charlie Nunn, told delegates at the Global Banking Summit that the combination of “tokenized deposits” and artificial intelligence could revolutionize mortgage lending, moving funds and payments – in short, the entire home buying chain.
In this vision, the customer's money would exist on the blockchain – and yet it would still be a real, regulated deposit.
The money can then be launched in the form of “smart contracts” to automatically perform tasks such as exchanging documentation, property valuation, payment or legal transfer.
Nunn said this could significantly shorten and speed up the usually painful mortgage process.
Experts say this is not a distant dream. The deposit tokenization system has been tested across the UK and the bank wants to make fully working version available by 2027.
Combining blockchain with artificial intelligence isn't just about speed – it's a chance for the bank to rethink money itself.
By automatically executing repetitive parts of any process (such as payments or document flow) via smart contracts and relying solely on humans to manage complexity (previously thought to be an avoidable source of human error and bureaucracy), AI models can play a role in these solutions.
It's an attempt to make financial services more like a smartphone, rather than filling out endless forms.
Of course, there are a few ifs. This kind of technological leap relies largely on regulatory approvals, infrastructure being deployed not only in the real estate industry but also in the legal and banking sectors – and most importantly, people actively trust the blockchain-backed mortgage system.
Will homebuyers, real estate agents and lawyers catch up? This remains to be seen.
But if it works – and assuming Lloyds succeeds, let's not doubt the rest of the article on the basis of an anecdote! – perhaps we are witnessing a completely new era: one in which buying a house is no longer equivalent to climbing a mountain of paper documents, but to pressing the “buy” button in an application.
