As Forbes reported on Aug. 14, Kelly Services will deploy Moonlighting’s blockchain-enabled hiring platform in a bid to streamline internal processes such as secure uploading of job seekers’ profiles and their distribution among various platforms.
Moonlighting is based on EOSIO’s public blockchain and reportedly does not involve the use of a cryptocurrency.
Global staffing company Kelly Services announced a strategic partnership with online blockchain-based hiring platform Moonlighting.
Moonlighting CEO and founder Jeff Tennery told Forbes that the biggest problem with the gig economy is its fragmentation, wherein people have to keep logging over and over again into various websites and applications. Tennery continued:
«Kelly and Moonlighting are really collaborating to fix that problem so that people could be more efficient in the way they share their data so they can get hired. Blockchain just fits that very nicely, and then the control is really in the hands of the user.»
John Healy, vice president and managing director at the Office of the Future of Work within Kelly Services, stipulated that the collaboration between the companies could result in “some pretty significant market opportunities.” Healy said:
«We’re going to learn. We’ve got three of our business units today that are actively exploring how to leverage both the technology that Moonlighting has, as well as the business process that we’re delivering for our customers and for our workers to figure out where that best fit is.»
Are other companies ready to use blockchain?
A survey by Big Four audit company KPMG released in February showed that 48% of C-level executives believe that blockchain is likely to change the way they do business in the next three years. 27% of executives said that the Internet of Things will be one of the greatest blockchain disruptors over the next three years.
When asked about the possibility of implementing blockchain in their companies, 41% of respondents said they were likely to use the technology, 31% did not give a straight answer, while 28% said they were not likely to implement blockchain.
In June, research firm Data Foundation and IT firm Booz Allen Hamilton released a report examining the feasibility of blockchain implementation by the United States federal government.
MAS, JPMorgan Build Payments System With Inter-Blockchain Connectivity
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the city-state’s central bank, has completed development of a blockchain-based cross border payments system that can support a range of currencies.
Carried out as part of the ongoing Project Ubin initiative, the prototype platform was developed in partnership with investment banking multinational JPMorgan and Singapore government-owned investment firm Temasek. It’s now being tested to see if it lives up to its promise as a means to cut costs for businesses and to gauge its ability to connect with different commercial blockchain applications, MAS said on Monday.
The project has been some time in the works, with the second phase of the project announced back in 2017. Earlier tests had involved MAS and a group of major banks, with blockchain startup-consortium R3 and professional services firm Deloitte also involved. Originally focused on digitization of the Singapore dollar using blockchain, the project moved on to look at the tech’s potential to support a real-time gross settlement system like those used by central banks.
With Ubin now in its fifth phase, MAS said the payments prototype “will provide interfaces for other blockchain networks to connect and integrate seamlessly.” It’s also been built to offer additional benefits such as delivery-versus-payment (DvP) settlement with private exchanges, conditional payments and escrow and payment commitments for trade finance.
“We hope this development will encourage other central banks to conduct similar trials, and we will make the technical specifications publicly accessible to accelerate these efforts”, said Sopnendu Mohanty, chief finTech officer at MAS. “We look forward to linking up with more blockchain networks to improve cross-border connectivity. This will be a big step forward in making cross-border transactions faster, cheaper, and safer.”
With the code now developed, over 40 companies from within finance and elsewhere have been working to ascertain the commercial viability and overall value of the platform.
JPMorgan indicated that work on its own blockchain initiative for internal business payments – which utilizes a dollar-pegged stablecoin – has informed work on the Ubin project.
John Hunter, global head of clearing and Interbank Information Network at JPMorgan, said:
“By leveraging our key learnings from building the Interbank Information Network and the JPM Coin, J.P. Morgan is well-positioned to support the development of a blockchain-based payments network and operate at scale.”
Planned for early next year, professional services giant Accenture will publish a report on the project, listing the potential use cases for a blockchain payments platform and setting out additional features that could be built into the system. The technical specs for the platform’s connectivity interfaces will be made freely available under the Apache License Version 2.0.
