14 Italian Banks Test Blockchain Tech for Interbank Reconciliations

The Banking Association of Italy (ABI) officially launched a Blockchain pilot to carry out a test on the technology for interbank reconciliations. ABI lab, the consortium’s technological laboratory will conduct out the trial and more 14 local banks will be initially involved in this process. The whole group will exploit the Cords platform that was developed by R3.

The banks will employ distributed ledger technology (DLT) for reconciliation during the blockchain pilot and this process helps to check whether two banks have two matching corresponding accounts.

The financial institutions will further leverage the blockchain technology to prove certain elements such as lack of a standard approach and a unified communications protocol, time required to determine transactions that do not match and visibility of transactions between banks.

If all goes well, the technology will enable banks to create bilateral channels that will help in exchanging data using smart contracts.

ABI is currently working on the application with NTT Data and cooperating with SIA, the blockchain startup behind Siacoin for the node network and useful verification procedures.

SIA said last year in November that it was seriously planning to start up a 600-node infrastructure to be used by different clients such as governments, banks, and business institutions so that they can easily connect the blockchain app developed by R3.

After the first phase of the project, the pilot will be further extended such that it can include more banks. Currently, there are only 14 giant banks that are participating in the pilot which include Ubi, Intesa Sanpaolo, Nexi Banca, Banca Mediolanum, BNL BNP Paribas Group, Banca Monte dei Paschi do Siena, Banca Popolare do Sondrio, Banca Sella, Creditors Emiliano, Banco BPM, CheBanca! - Mediobanca Group, Credit Agricole (a member of the RippleNet consortium), Creditors Valtellinese and Iccrea Banca.

Citibank and Credit Agricole purchased stakes in SETL, a London-based blockchain startup that provides a payments and settlements platform during February this year. After one month, the French banking group disclosed that some of its entities were delving into Ripple’s blockchain for money transfers.