JPMorgan is to pilot the application of cross-border interbank payments over its enterprise-ready distributed ledger and smart contract platform Quorum.
The big US bank believes Quorum has the potential to revolutionise the interbank payments business and is inviting other banks to join a newly-formed Interbank Information Network (IIN) alliance to try out the platform. ANZ and the Australian arm of Royal Bank of Canada are the first to sign up.
An enterprise-focused version of Ethereum, Quorum is deisgned to support any application requiring high speed and high throughput processing of private transactions within a permissioned group of known participants.
JPMorgan is a founding member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, which favours the development of corporate-grade technology over the collaborative open source blockchain platform.
Emma Loftus, head of global payments and foreign exchange for JPMorgan Treasury Services, comments: "IIN will enhance the client experience, decreasing the amount of time - from weeks to hours - and costs associated with resolving payment delays. Blockchain capabilities have allowed us to rethink how critical information can be sourced and exchanged between global banks."
Speaking at the plenary session of the Swift interbank payments conference in Toronto, RBC chief Dave McKay concurred. "Blockchain has enormous potential to reduce the friction and cost of cross-border payments," he told the packed audience of correspondent bankers.