JPMorgan and Visa team up on cross-border blockchain payments

Traditional finance and payment giants JPMorgan and Visa are teaming up to streamline the use of their private blockchain solutions Liink and B2B Connect to facilitate cross-border payments.

According to an Oct. 11 report from Forbes, JPMorgan’s Liink is a network specifically designed for cross-border transfers and offered under the bank’s blockchain and payments initiative, Onyx. Onyx provides a platform for institutions to share financial information and validate transactions.

Visa’s B2B Connect is a similar network to Liink that was built for use in institutions and is now integrated with Onyx’s Confirm.

Confirm is a product for validating account information, and ensures that transaction partners provide real identities and correct information. Onyx says Confirm is able to verify more than 2 billion bank accounts from 3,500 financial institutions.

Finextra reported on October 11 that JPMorgan is looking to find a number of founding member banks worldwide as it works to launch Confirm in 10 countries by the end of this year. Going forward, it is said that the bank is looking for a rollout in 30 countries next year.

German financial behemoth Deutsche Bank has also signed on to become a founding member of Confirm.

Confirm’s global head, Alex Littleton, explained in a public statement that “Confirm’s growth is strongly influenced by network effects,” adding that “Naming Deutsche Bank as a founding member, while establishing interconnection to Visa B2B’s blockchain, will accelerate our adoption on a global scale.”

With Visa teaming up with JPMorgan and its suite of blockchain products, the duo appears to have an eye on offering an alternative to the commonly used Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) messaging system to manage and facilitate cross-border payments.

Related: SWIFT says it has reached a “breakthrough” in recent CBDC experiments

The idea of ​​cross-border payments has been in the spotlight this week, with the Monetary Authority of Singapore revealing on October 10 that it could look to use blockchain technology to provide solutions to current issues with such, including speed and cost.

Ravi Menon, chief executive of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, noted in a keynote address that the current state of cross-border payments “is not fit for the 21st century,” adding that:

“It is slow, costly, opaque and inefficient, relying on an archaic network of correspondent banks.”

He outlined that the expansion of “private sector blockchain-based payment networks” could be one of the possible ways to solve this.

Ripple Labs has also made moves with its cross-border payments On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) product this week. On October 11, it announced partnerships with payments firm Lemonway and money transfer provider Xbaht that will see the duo leverage the ODL network to offer crypto payments to customers in France, Thailand and Sweden.