Mahindra & Mahindra, which has a presence in automotive, finance and IT sectors, could soon be known as one of the largest Blockchain players in the world.

Last month, M&M announced that it was working with IBM to cut down the time it takes for invoice discounting for Mahindra Finance. The company now wants Blockchain to be used for different purposes across the group and wants to engage not just IBM but also start-ups from across the world.

To achieve this, Mahindra will soon be setting up a global start-up incubation center outside of the country to attract Blockchain start-ups that can help the group in using the tech in as many ways as possible. The company could also look at offering Blockchain services to other companies once the technologies mature.

“We are looking at an incubation centre for Blockchain, which will be a global centre. We are one of the leaders in the tech today and we want to continue to establish ourselves as the leader. We are looking at developing a business. We’ve got about 7-10 business cases for Blockchain within the group,” Anish Shah, Group President of Strategy for the Mahindra Group, told BusinessLine .

Blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrency Bitcoin, allows the creation of decentralised ledgers that are considered virtually impossible to tamper.

“We started with supply chain and invoice discounting for supply chain. There are a number of use cases for Mahindra Finance and use cases for auto business and then we can take it forward for other businesses,” Shah said.

While M&M group company Tech Mahindra is also working on Blockchain, Shah said the incubation centre will work independent of Tech Mahindra and the Blockchain technologies that come out of the centre will be used across the company. Tech Mahindra also has start-up incubation centres in different parts of the world, which will remain independent.

“Tech Mahindra will have multiple start-up incubation centres but the Mahindra group will also set-up separate start-up incubation centres with different partners,” Shah said.

Apart from Blockchain, the group is also actively working on various other technologies and would look at setting up incubation centres for each of these.

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