SWIFT India Partners With Fintech Firm for Blockchain Pilot

SWIFT India has partnered with fintech firm MonetaGo to pilot a distributed ledger (DLT) network designed to improve the efficiency and security of financial products, according to a press release published Nov. 20.

SWIFT India is a joint venture established by SWIFT SCRL (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) and a number of major Indian and international banks, including HDFC Bank and the Bank of India. The organization provides messaging services to domestic market infrastructures, banks and corporates.

Per the announcement, the new program based on MonetaGo’s financial services network technology will be integrated through standardized SWIFT financial messages.

The banks will purportedly deploy a shared distributed ledger network, that complies with industry-level governance, security and data privacy requirements in order to improve the efficiency and security of their financial products and procedures.

According to Kiran Shetty, CEO of SWIFT India, the company will digitize trade processes, while MonetaGo will provide “fraud mitigation solutions to avoid double-financing and check authenticity of e-way Bill.” E-way Bill is an electronically generated bill for the specific movement of goods with a value more than 50,000 rupees ($700).

"Given India's focus on a digital infrastructure which is supported by both policy and technological innovation, it makes sense that large institutional players are interested in these products and initiatives," said Jesse Chenard, CEO of MonetaGo.

In September, the Union Cabinet of India approved a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on the collaborative research of DLT, with the aim to foster better understanding of DLT and define areas where the technology can be deployed to improve operational efficiency. The research was set to be jointly conducted by a number of leading banks “in the interests of the development of the digital economy.”

In August, Cointelegraph reported that India’s central bank allegedly planned to improve its understanding of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, allegedly setting up a unit dedicated to “research” of the phenomena, “to check what can be adopted and what cannot.”

In March 2018, SWIFT published a report on how a DLT Proof-of-Concept (PoC) can help Nostro account reconciliation. The results showed that DLT can provide the necessary functions of Nostro account reconciliation while SWIFT’s Head of Research and Development Damien Vanderveken said, “The PoC went extremely well, proving the fantastic progress that has been made with DLT and the Hyperledger fabric in particular.”