(25 May 2016 – Australia) ANZ Bank is trialling a shared ledger in the reconciliation of international payments with an unnamed US bank.
The Australian bank says it is not strictly using blockchain technology, however the shared ledger will act in a similar way. Its objective is to reconcile cross-border payments between counterparties in real time.
ANZ’s general manager of group payments, technology, services and operations, Nigel Dobson says: “This example for trade finance is more about counterparties co-operating sensibly to combat fraud, rather than any ‘transformative’ technology being deployed.”
Should the trial be successful, it will be extended to multiple counterparties in a “private community”.
The Hyperledger Project, which has around 30 founding members including technology firms IBM and Intel as well as global financial institutions, 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.
Earlier this year, East & Partners’ Trade Finance Markets Program found that although ANZ enjoys dominant market share in the institutional segment, ahead of HSBC, two of its “Big Four” rivals in Commonwealth Bank and Westpac have achieved stand out market share growth in the last three years.