The Italian Banking Association (ABI) says the country's major banks could be ready to use distributed ledger tech to run interbank reconciliations by March next year, after pilot tests proved its capability.
The move is part of the Spunta Project, a programme managed by ABI Lab, the association's research and innovation arm, designed to implement DLT within the country's interbank processes.
A total of 18 banks, representing 78% of the banking sector in terms of the number of employees, are involved in the project, which uses technology from NTT Data, SIA and R3.
It is hoped that the migration to a blockchain will result in full visibility of the transactions between banks, daily rather than monthly reconciliations, and more effective communication between counterparties in the event of an exception.
News of the DLT move, comes on the back of technical testing on 200 million data points across 35 nodes. The pilot simulated the production phase using a full year’s data from 200 banks.
"The applied architecture was robust without having to resort to specific technical solutions," states ABI Labs. "The methodology used allowed to analyse the operation for banking groups, and large and small banks. The test also allowed for an initial analysis of the response time process. The test was completely successful."