Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC) has become the first Singapore-based bank to join JPMorgan’s live blockchain service called Interbank Information Network (IIN).
With this development, the Singapore bank joins 112 other banks from the Asia-Pacific, with regional banks dominating the new participants’ list. The IIN now includes around 345 banking members across the globe.
Global head of clearing for JPMorgan Chase, John Hunter stated,
“The intent with IIN was always to develop a meaningful ecosystem of bank users; all focused on harnessing emerging technologies such as blockchain to better address the complex cross border payments industry. In just one year, we’ve seen the IIN scale as well as expand in terms of role and capabilities – and we are excited at the growth to come.”
Moreover, the IIN was initiated as a pilot program in 2017 to address the difficulties associated with the worldwide payment process. The IIN keeps running on a permission blockchain created by JPMorgan called Quorum, which is portrayed as a variation of the Ethereum blockchain.
Regardless, JP Morgan’s Interbank Information framework is the company’s first P2P, the scalable system connected by blockchain technology. By limiting the problems in the cross-border payments’ procedure, and also empowering payments to reach the recipients quicker with a few methods, IIN serves to address the longstanding difficulties of interbank data sharing.
A week ago, Germany’s biggest Deutsche Bank also joined the IIN framework, which permits other member banks to trade data related to global payments on JPMorgan’s Quorum. The new association of OCBC arrives only a couple of days after Deutsche Bank, the world’s largest clearer of euro payments associated with the IIN. JPMorgan is aiming to have 400 members before the closure of 2019.
