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JPMorgan Chase has created two business units to focus on building blockchain-based software and services and potentially to promote the use of the digital currency JPM Coin.
On Wednesday, the bank announced a new brand, Liink, for its blockchain-based Interbank Information Network. JPMorgan Chase describes that network as a “banking user ecosystem focused on leveraging emerging technologies such as blockchain to better address the complex cross-border payments industry.”
The network currently has 400 bank members. In North America, these members are Bank of Montreal, First Horizon Bank, National Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Canada, and TD Bank.
The bank also started a group called Onyx as a larger firm that oversees multiple blockchain-related initiatives. They include Liink, JPM Coin, other initiatives previously run by the bank’s Blockchain Center of Excellence, and some payment platforms. Onyx has more than 100 employees and is managed by Umar Farooq, who previously headed digital wholesale payments and the blockchain.
The bank has appointed Christine Moy as Liink’s global head. The firm creates quorum-based software and services to facilitate cross-border payments processed through traditional channels such as Swift. Liink applications mainly focus on solving international payments problems.
In the correspondent banking ecosystem, when a payment gets stuck for some reason, it can take weeks of phone calls, emails, and faxes to fix it. Liink aims to decentralize it and make it much more efficient.
By the time it was called the Interbank Information Network, the group had already developed a product to help banks resolve exceptions to sanctions.
On Wednesday, Liink launched two new products: Confirm, which allows bank members to validate account information for other parties before sending payments to banks in other countries, in the interest of catching scammers; and Format, which checks potential payments to make sure they adhere to the correct currency formats.
Another application in the pipeline will digitize lockbox systems to help reduce the amount of paper checks that banks have to process each month for customers.
According to Moy, Liink’s bank members can also distribute their own applications over the network.
“One thing that sets Liink apart from some of the other networks and consortia is that we have paid particular attention to ensuring that our Liink participants have the opportunity to create new revenue streams,” Moy said.
In some respects, the two new blockchain-focused units are the reincarnation of JPMorgan Chase’s previous Quorum development.
The developers created Quorum, which was once led by Moy, in 2016 to provide security, access control, privacy and performance components to make using an Ethereum distributed ledger more palatable and useful for banks than any blockchain. public.
In August, the bank sold Quorum to Brooklyn-based blockchain technology and decentralized finance firm ConsenSys. In doing so, the bank effectively outsourced Quorum’s future development to ConsenSys by becoming a customer of its own. Living outside the bank could make Quorum more attractive to JPMorgan Chase’s competitors. The quorum is now called ConsenSys Quorum.
Meanwhile, the Onyx group will manage all projects related to JPM Coin, the stablecoin the bank announced it created in February 2019, as well as overseeing Liink. The bank said a large international company, which it would not name, has started using the stablecoin for cross-border payments and that other customers have been integrated.
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