Italian Bank Consortium Trials Interbank Transfers on R3's Corda

The second largest bank in Italy, Intesa Sanpaolo, and 13 other banks have successfully completed the first phase of an interbank reconciliation blockchain trial.

The tests, which started on June 4, were held in conjunction with ABI Lab - a research lab supported by the Italian Banking Association - and finished last week.

The project is aimed to improve certain aspects of "Spunta," or inter-bank transactions, such as the time needed to identify mismatched transactions between two banks, and the lack of a standardized process and a single communication protocol.

In the 10-month proof-of-concept and testing phase, each bank was assigned a node and the banks uploaded actual data bank data, processing 1,200,000 transactions through the course of the trial.

The interbank system is built on Corda Enterprise, the platform developed by blockchain consortium startup R3 that offers what's called a Blockchain Application Firewall.

"Currently, two banks involved in the project are members of R3. They share our goal of moving blockchain applications into commercial deployment and changing business from within and we are pleased to be working with them on this project".

The group is now preparing for the next phase of the project in which the banks will utilize the blockchain application for everyday transactions.

Intesa Sanpaolo bank pavilion image via Shutterstock.

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