ANZ pilots shared ledger for payments reconciliation
Nigel Dobson, ANZ
Australia and New Zealand-based banking group, ANZ, is trialling a shared ledger in the reconciliation of international payments with an unnamed US bank.
ANZ says it is not strictly using blockchain but the shared ledger will act in a similar way. Its objective is to reconcile cross-border payments between counterparties in real time.
Nigel Dobson, the bank’s general manager of group payments, technology, services and operations, says: “This example for trade finance is more about counterparties co-operating sensibly to combat fraud, rather than any ‘transformative’ technology being deployed.”
If the trial works well before the end of 2016, it will be extended to multiple counterparties in a “private community”.
The Hyperledger Project is the “sponsor” for ANZ’s co-operation with the US bank. Hyperledger is an open source project intended to advance blockchain digital technology for recording and verifying transactions.
Recently, the Linux Foundation, a non-profit organisation geared to promoting open source technology announced 30 members from across the finance and technology industries joined its Hyperledger Project.
The founding members of the initiative represent a diverse group of stakeholders, including: ABN AMRO, Accenture, ANZ Bank, Blockchain, BNY Mellon, Calastone, Cisco, CLS, CME Group, ConsenSys, Credits, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Deutsche Börse Group, Digital Asset Holdings, Fujitsu Limited, Guardtime, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, IntellectEU, JP Morgan, NEC, NTT DATA, R3, Red Hat, State Street, SWIFT, Symbiont, VMware and Wells Fargo.
