Austria's Raiffeisen Bank is to pilot the use of digital currency for money transfers and custody with corporate and institutional clients after a successful proof-of-concept with British-Polish fintech BIllon.
The pilot will lever a new form of national currency tokenization using Billon’s distributed ledger technology, successfully tested during RBI’s Elevator Lab acceleration programme earlier this year.
Pegged 1:1 to the euro or any other national currency in CEE, the RBI Coin is designed to speed up cross-border transactions.
Stefan Andjelic, blockchain hub lead at Raiffeisen Bank International, comments: “Billon is a great example of a fintech that understands how to adapt blockchain to serve the needs of banks and their clients. Specifically during the Covid-19 situation, banks need to partner with fintechs to innovate faster and help clients with payments processing and liquidity needs.”
With the system, e-money transactions can be supplemented with additional documents or data, such as invoices and confirmation of source of funds, for full transparency and audit trail. End-to-end benefits will be estimated at the end of the pilot, but Billon expects the bank to improve customer experience, differentiate its offering and achieve process and cost efficiencies in several categories.