JPMorgan and DBS to launch blockchain cross-border payment platform

Published at: April 28, 2021

Major American investment bank JPMorgan is working with Singapore’s largest bank, DBS, and state investment firm Temasek to launch a new blockchain company focused on global payments and interbank transactions.

Dubbed Partior, the new firm will use blockchain technology and digitize commercial bank money to reduce the existing friction in cross-border payments, trade transactions and foreign exchange settlements. 

Such functionality would enable instant settlement of payments for various types of transactions, helping banks overcome global payment-related challenges in the current financial system, JPMorgan said in a Wednesday announcement.

The new platform builds on JPMorgan and Temasek’s past work as part of Project Ubin, a blockchain-based multi-currency payment initiative initiated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore in 2017. Partior’s platform will launch with a focus on facilitating flows mainly between Singapore-based banks in both the United States dollar and the Singapore dollar, aiming to extend service offerings to other markets in various currencies.

The platform aims to complement ongoing central bank digital currency projects and use cases, the announcement notes. MAS chief fintech officer Sopnendu Mohanty said that Partior provides a foundational global infrastructure for transacting with digital currencies. “The launch of Partior is a global watershed moment for digital currencies, marking a move from pilots and experimentations towards commercialization and live adoption,” he said.

DBS CEO Piyush Gupta stated that blockchain technology and smart contracts will enable Partior to support “real-time cross-border multi-currency payments, trade finance, foreign exchange and DVP securities settlements on a world-class platform, with programmability, immutability, traceability built into its suite of services.”

All three Partior project participants are consolidating their involvement in the cryptocurrency industry. In late 2020, DBS established a crypto exchange division called DBS Digital Exchange allowing investors to trade major coins, such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and XRP.

JPMorgan reportedly started hiring Ethereum developers in April. The company is also rumored to be preparing to launch an actively managed Bitcoin fund. As reported in March, Temasek is allegedly a Bitcoin investor.

Tags
Technology
Blockchain
United States
Singapore
Government
Payments
Jpmorgan Chase
Dbs Bank
Related Posts
France and Singapore pilot cross-border CBDC transactions
Financial authorities in France and Singapore are actively exploring the cross-border applications of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). In a joint announcement on Thursday, the Bank of France and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said that they successfully completed a whole cross-border payment and settlement experiment using CBDCs and blockchain technology. The CBDC experiment was conducted with support and expertise from JPMorgan's digital currency-focused Onyx division on a permissioned, privacy-enabled blockchain based on the investment bank's Quorum blockchain infrastructure. As part of the experiment, the Bank of France and MAS simulated cross-border and cross-currency transactions for a Singapore dollar-based …
Technology / July 8, 2021
Indian IT giant Tech Mahindra to launch stablecoin tool for banks
Indian multinational technology firm Tech Mahindra is developing a new stablecoin service targeting banks and financial institutions. The tech giant announced Monday that it has entered into an agreement with Dutch blockchain application incubator Quantoz to launch a “stablecoin-as-a-service” tool to reduce transaction costs and processing times. The new collaboration targets potential clients from the banking and financial sector as the United States’ Office of the Comptroller of the Currency officially allowed federally chartered U.S. banks to use public blockchains and stablecoins for settlements in January 2021. Rajesh Dhuddu, blockchain and cybersecurity leader at Tech Mahindra, said: “The recent OCC …
Technology / April 6, 2021
Singapore's Blockchain Payments Platform Ready for Commercial Launch
Singapore authorities announced today that their blockchain payments project, Project Ubin, is complete and ready for commercial launch. The Monetary Authority of Singapore, or MAS, first undertook Project Ubin in 2017 with plans to first develop a digitized Singapore dollar (SGD). The next steps involved exploring blockchain and distributed ledger technology to build a system for the clearing and settlement of payments and securities using digital SGD. For the final phase of the project, MAS worked in collaboration with the Singapore-based investment company Temasek and the American investment bank JPMorgan. MAS had successfully completed the development of the payments network …
Adoption / July 13, 2020
The new episode of crypto regulation: The Empire Strikes Back
The latest news has left the decentralized finance community in a collective fetal position. Responding to the threat of increased regulatory oversight, leading decentralized exchange Uniswap recently restricted the trading of certain tokens. Earlier in July, Dan M. Berkovitz, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), said that DeFi derivatives platforms might contravene the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA): “Not only do I think that unlicensed DeFi markets for derivative instruments are a bad idea, but I also do not see how they are legal under the CEA.” Most worrisome of all is the initial version of the United States …
Technology / Aug. 27, 2021
Smart contracts and the law: Tech developments challenge legal community
Smart contracts are an important element of the blockchain revolution, although they predate blockchain. According to most sources, it was Nick Szabo who coined the term “smart contract” in the 1990s. The mechanism of a vending machine has since been frequently given as an example of a basic smart contract based on if-then logic. The payment into a vending machine triggers an irrevocable automated action from when money is retained to when an item is supplied. The emergence of blockchain technology enabled the implementation of such if-then logic on decentralized networks to facilitate autonomous self-executing, self-performing smart contracts, also called …
Technology / June 19, 2021