JPMorgan and Visa teamed up to work on optimizing their private blockchain solutions Liink and B2B Connect to facilitate cross-border payments.
According to Forbes definition, JPMorgan's Liink is a network specifically designed for cross-border transfers and offered as part of the bank's Onyx blockchain and payments initiative. Onyx provides institutions with a platform for exchanging financial information and confirming transactions.
Visa's B2B Connect is a similar Liink network created for institutional use, which is now integrated with Onxy's Confirm.
Confirm is a product for checking account information, which ensures that the participants in transactions are genuine individuals, and they provide true information. Onyx claims that the Confirm program is able to verify more than 2 billion bank accounts from 3,500 financial institutions.
Finextra reported yesterday that J.P. Morgan plans to launch Confirm in 10 countries by the end of this year, for which it seeks to attract local banks. J.P. Morgan is rumored to be planning to roll out Confirm in 30 countries next year.
Thus, in the future, Visa and JPMorgan can create an alternative to the widely used Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) messaging system to manage and facilitate cross-border payments.
Ravi Menon, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, in his keynote speech this week noted that the current state of the cross-border payment system "is not suitable for the 21st century":
"It is slow, expensive, non-transparent and inefficient, relying on an archaic network of correspondent banks."
He noted that the expansion of "private sector payment networks based on blockchain" could be one of the possible ways to solve this problem.
