JPMorgan Partners DBS, Temasek For Cross-border Payment Platform

US investment bank JPMorgan has teamed up with Singaporean bank DBS and state investment firm Temasek with plans to develop a blockchain-powered global open industry platform to reimagine and accelerate value movements for payments, trade and foreign exchange settlement.

This will be executed through a newly-established technology company called Partior, which aims to disrupt the traditional cross-border payments model by reducing current frictions and latency for cross-border payments, trade transactions and foreign exchange settlements.

Partior will develop a more efficient digital clearing and settlement solutions across the banking industry through the use of blockchain solutions to enable next generation, programmable value transfer for participating banks and their clients in real-time across a common and open platform.

The Partior platform will also develop wholesale payments rails based on digitized commercial bank money to enable “atomic” or instantaneous settlement of payments for various types of financial transactions. This will help banks overcome challenges presented by the current standard sequential method of processing global payments.

By harnessing the benefits of blockchain and smart contracts technology, the Partior platform will address current pain points such as multiple validations on payment details by banks, which translate to costly and onerous post transaction exception handling and reconciliation activities.

The open platform will enable banks around the world to provide real-time cross-border multi-currency payments, trade finance, foreign exchange and delivery versus payment (DVP) securities settlements. Programmability, immutability, traceability will be built into its suite of services.

The platform will initially focus on facilitating flows primarily between Singapore-based banks in both US dollar and Singapore dollar, with the intent to expand service offerings to other markets and in various currencies. Partior’s platform will also be designed to complement ongoing Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) initiatives and use cases.

These efforts by DBS, J.P. Morgan and Temasek is build on their past work as part of Project Ubin, an industry initiative by the Monetary Authority of Singapore that was initiated in 2017 to explore the application of blockchain technology involving multi-currency payments and settlements.

However, the companies said the operation of Partior by them and the completion of development, launch and availability of services on the proposed platform are subject to obtaining any required regulatory consents and approvals.

Partior will now actively engage with leading global banks to join the platform to establish the scale required to benefit the industry with the broad participation across the banking industry.