ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, IBM, Scentre Group and Westpac have jointly launched a distributed ledger pilot project to digitise and simplify management of bank guarantees for Australian retail businesses.The initial test phase of the platform, to be known as Lygon, will run for eight weeks using live data and transactions drawn from a group of retail property lease holders in some of Scentre Group's Westfield centres.The Lygon platform, based on IBM's Hyperledger blockchain technology, is operated by Lygon 1B Pty Ltd, a company jointly owned by the five founding members. Its backers say the system, if successful, has the potential to transform the way businesses obtain and manage the bank guarantees that are often required as part of a retail property lease.Historically, bank guarantees issued to retail property lessees have been issued manually and on paper, and often kept locked in a safe by the shopping centre's managers.Digitising this process reduces the risk of fraud for all parties involved - covering billions of dollars guaranteed by banks - while speeding up execution times and reducing the potential for errors. According to the project's backers, their initial findings suggested the Lygon platform has the potential to reduce the time to issue a bank guarantee from up to a month to "on or around the same day". The Lygon partners plan to expand digitised bank guarantees to other industries as well as offering services to other customers in the retail property sector. "While the live platform will benefit retailers with rental bonds, we see the platform eventually supporting all types of bank guarantee," said Nigel Dobson, ANZ banking services lead.John Papagiannis, leasing and retail solutions director at Scentre Group, owner and operator of Westfield in Australia and New Zealand, said bank guarantees are an important part of his company's relationship with its tenants, with "several thousand" leases signed each year. "The current paper-based process is a pain point for us and for our retail partners because of the time involved and the manual nature of the process. We look forward to analysing the outcome of the first pilot."While not in the sights of the Lygon project, another area that has long been ripe for this type of a shake-up is cross-border finance, where IBM has been running a European joint venture with banks CaixaBank, Deutsche Bank, Erste Group, HSBC, KBC, Natixis, Nordea, Rabobank, Santander, Société Générale, UBS and UniCredit. The we.trade platform began full operations with real transactions in July 2018, adding three more banks to the we.trade platform in October, extending its geographical reach to cover more than a dozen countries.