Bank of England governor Mark Carney on Wednesday spoke about the potential of the nascent technology at the UK Treasury's first International Fintech conference.

The governor of the UK's central bank has said that blockchain technology could “transform” crucial parts of financial infrastructure. 

Bank of England governor Mark Carney spoke yesterday spoke about the potential of the nascent technology at the UK Treasury's first International Fintech conference.

“New technologies could transform wholesale payments, clearing and settlement,” Carney said. “In particular, distributed ledger technology could yield significant gains in the accuracy, efficiency and security of such processes, saving tens of billions of pounds of bank capital and significantly improving the resilience of the system.”

Distributed ledger technology, or blockchain technology, is a virtual distributed ledger of transactions shared peer-to-peer that can record ownership across a public network of computers rendered tamper-proof by advanced cryptography. It is already known as the platform underpinning the controversial digital currency bitcoin.

The technology is causing a stir within the financial services sector as its supporters believe it could reduce hidden expenses in the financial system by ousting inefficiencies across areas such as payments, syndicated loans and equity clearing. 

Carney's comments underlined Bank of England's enthusiasm for developing blockchain-based solutions that could help streamline certain financial processes. 

He said the bank is committed to “help build the right infrastructure for the financial technology industry to realise its promise”. He added that Bank of England was looking to develop new proofs-of-concept, and that it was using “ a rang of big data tools” to harvest information to support the bank's analysis. 

Earlier in the conference, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, described financial technology, or fintech, as the “fourth industrial revolution”.

The Treasury said ahead of the event that the UK's fintech sector — which includes everything from online lending to applying blockchain to capital markets — is now worth £7 billion ($8.8 billion) to the UK economy and employs 60,000 people. 

Hammond added that London “is at the forefront of the fintech revolution, changing the way in which financial services are accessed and delivered”. 

But he warned that the UK “cannot and will not rest on our laurels”. Hammond said that post-Brexit, the UK must “build trade links with those fast growing economies of Asia”.