- JPMorgan has built a blockchain-powered cross-border payment product: the Interbank Information Network.
- 75 banks have now signed up to test it, including Santander and Societe Generale.
- JPMorgan is one of several banks looking at how to use blockchain technology in mainstream finance.
A blockchain-based payment project led by JPMorgan has now signed up 75 banks to help testing, according to the Financial Times.
The FT reported on Tuesday that lenders including Santander and Societe Generale are testing the Interbank Information Network (IIN). JPMorgan built the information sharing programme on its own proprietary blockchain platform, Quorom, and has been testing it with a handful of lenders since October 2017.
IIN is a shared ledger for cross-border payments that allows banks to quickly and easily add or correct information necessary for payments sent between banks. It competes with legacy platforms such as SWIFT and new startups like Ripple.
JPMorgan's CFO Marianne Lake told BI in March: "One of the most costly and time-consuming elements of executing cross-border payments today is in correspondent banks having to research and respond to compliance inquiries of each other. Today, payments that are flagged for compliance reasons can be delayed for up to two weeks, but this technology can reduce that to minutes."
Lake said at the time that other banks have "a lot of appetite" to "join the party."
JPMorgan is one of several banks trying to bring blockchain technology into mainstream finance. First popularised as the technological underpinning of bitcoin, blockchain's ability to securely share information has made it attractive to high-security, collaborative industries such as banking.
Many of the other projects in existence are either on a smaller scale or at an earlier stage and JPMorgan's head of blockchain Umar Farooq told the FT: "This is the single biggest."
