Commonwealth Bank staked out its deep interest in blockchain as a method for reshaping aspects of its business yesterday."Identity is a secondary reconsideration" in some banking transactions, David Whiteing, group executive for enterprise services at CBA said at the Blockchain Workshop conference held at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney yesterday. "Today many of our interactions involve a third party to establish that trust," Whiteing said."That third party and that process is complicated, and it adds friction."The blockchain will enable the removal of that third party, and enable trust without identity."He said the plan was "that we actually move away from the concept of having to identify someone before we transact with them, and then use the blockchain and the protocols to understand: is what they're doing legitimate, and should we be comfortable with that transaction?"Actually identity is a secondary reconsideration."Blockchain, Whiteing explained, is "something that we've been interested in and talking about with growing levels of insights and perspective over the last two years. It presents a very exciting set of opportunities and protocols for how we might think about the business going forward."With more than a nod at the ultimate driver of this thinking, Whiteing said blockchain was "clearly faster, cheaper and more transparent than some of the existing practices we have today. But more importantly than that, as we've looked at this and explored and experimented, it goes way beyond just banking, and from our perspective that's an exciting opportunity as well. "As we constantly think about what a bank in the future looks like, certainly the blockchain is a stark example of how we need to think quickly about that, and how we might evolve about where we take that thinking."The CBA CIO swung in line with thinking that "we should be looking at blockchain as a mechanism to establish title and establish liquidity to enable that title to be transferred"  - a method Whiteing, among others, considers relevant to fostering social inclusion.Summing up, Whiteing said that, from CBA's perspective, there were "two lenses that are starting to be important."One is the network effect, which is clearly established, but more importantly is this element of trust … transparency in network is one thing, but actually that element of trust is what's accelerating and fuelling the interactions and the use cases."From our perspective, the blockchain is something that starts to enable that trust element in a different way."