Bank of New York Mellon has named Subhankar Sinha as Head of Blockchain. A BNY Mellon spokesman told Bank Innovation that the position is new at the bank “and was created as a result of the acceleration of proof-of-concept initiatives across the bank that align with BNY Mellon’s growth strategy and digitization priorities.”

Sinha’s blockchain background includes a stint as a director at consulting firm PwC, where he co-founded and co-led the firm’s blockchain consulting practice in the U.S. At BNY, he will focus on developing partnerships with startups, accelerators, incubators and business partners “to drive enterprise innovation and build ecosystems for all BNY Mellon blockchain initiatives.”

According to BNY Mellon, Sinha’s recent focus has been on the impact of blockchain and tokenization on lending and securitization, as well as developing blockchain use cases and revenue opportunities in lending, reinsurance, asset management, asset servicing, transaction banking, pharmaceutical, logistics and corporate treasury.

Indeed, blockchain technology has become a “critical priority,” meaning a top-five strategic priority, for organizations in 2019, according to 53% of respondents to a Deloitte survey released earlier this week. This represents a 10-point increase over the previous year’s results.

Some 83% of responding organizations see compelling use cases for blockchain, up from 74%. Four out of 10 respondents said their organizations are willing to invest $5 million or more in new blockchain initiatives over the next 12 months, although only 23% expect to initiate new blockchain deployments over that same period.

According to Deloitte, the dissonance and cautious optimism reflected a “growing pragmatism” as the technology “evolves into a more grounded business solution.” In any case, the overall positive momentum appears to be translating into action across the financial services industry, even at some of the largest financial institutions.

In addition to BNY Mellon’s hire, JPMorgan Chase and Microsoft last week announced a strategic partnership through which Quorum, developed by JPMorgan, will become the first distributed ledger platform available through Azure Blockchain Service, enabling the bank’s and Microsoft’s customers to build and scale blockchain networks in the cloud.

According to JPMorgan, the partnership with Azure would strengthen Quorum as a fully-integrated, Ethereum-based blockchain platform and suite of applications while enabling enterprise businesses across all industries to shift their focus from infrastructure management to application development. “Customers will be able to rapidly grow their networks while benefiting from lower costs, simplified deployment and built-in governance enabled through Azure Blockchain Service,” the bank stated in a release. The bank declined to comment further on the partnership or blockchain adoption.

It’s worth noting that the JPMorgan-Microsoft announcement came just days after Amazon Web Services unveiled Amazon Managed Blockchain, staking its own claim as a cloud network to facilitate large-scale blockchain deployments. That said, roadblocks to adoption remain, with a lack of regulatory certainty around blockchain cited as a main factor in the Deloitte survey.

Daniel Farris, a partner at law firm K&L Gates, whose clients include traditional FIs and fintechs, concurred that regulatory uncertainty around blockchain is holding back innovation in the space by financial institutions. This is despite what he called “a lot of excitement” among industry players to tokenize service offerings.

“Regulation is not scary to most banks or financial institutions because they live in a highly-regulated world,” Farris told Bank Innovation. “Compliance is not an abnormal thing, but when you create an environment where there are new products or solutions or technologies and there’s ambiguity in the application of the regulations or the meanings of the regulations to those new technologies, that creates a different type of risk that banks and financial institutions are not comfortable with.”