Bank of America Merrill Lynch is developing a blockchain-based experiment for trade finance transactions, as financial institutions step up their efforts to bring bitcoin’s underlying technology to practical use.

Jason Tiede, head of innovation for global transaction services at BAML, said: "We are working on a pilot in the trade finance space. As trade finance often relies on manual, paper-based processes, it serves as an interesting use case of the value of digitising an asset on a distributed ledger."