Italian interbank DLT project Spunta moves to pre-production
Spunta Project, a blockchain-based application for interbank reconciliations, has passed several tests and is moving onto the pre-production phase.
18 Italian banks, and counting
As of today (13 February), 18 banks are actively involved in the testing, selection and implementation of the new distributed technology.
The project, coordinated by ABI Lab, the banking research and innovation centre promoted by the Italian Banking Association (ABI), together with technical partners NTT Data, SIA, and R3’s Corda platform, aims to implement the blockchain in interbank processes.
The objective is to provide data transparency and visibility, faster transaction execution and the possibility of performing checks and exchanges directly within the application.
Initial tests on the blockchain platform and on the transaction management have already been carried out with the involvement of the banks.
The project team has said that among the upcoming updates, there will be the management of infra-group reconciliations, the creation of reliable reports for auditors, and the further refinement of the matching algorithm.
The next steps will include technical testing of the platform’s stability to verify its overall performance simulating the production phase for the entire Italian banking sector.
To do this, a data simulator will generate transaction volumes over a period of 365 days. The simulation will be carried out in a geographically distributed environment and connected through a private network.
In Italy, the reconciliation is an interbank process based on bilateral registers, has a low impact on the overall business, a low level of standardisation, and lacks advanced operating processes.
ABI defines the operating procedures to be applied in the reconciliation process. The mutual accounts regulation is based on an interbank agreement created in 1978, revised in 1987 and further amended in the 90s.
This project will lead to the automatic check of mismatched transactions based on a shared algorithm; the standardisation of the process and of a single communications protocol; and the visibility of transactions between the parties.
The name’s loose translation is “Bank Check” Project. In our last update, just a couple of months ago, the project had 17 banks. It seems it keeps gaining momentum.
