JP Morgan Teams up with DBS and Temasek to Establish Blockchain Payments Platform

JP Morgan​ (NYSE: JPM), DBS, Singapore's leading bank and financial services group, and Temasek announced on Wednesday the plan to develop a cross-border payments​ platform based on blockchain technology through a newly established company — Partior.

In the official announcement, the partners highlight that the drive behind this move is to reimagine and accelerate value movements for payments, trade and foreign exchange settlement through the use of blockchain solutions. 

​Partior aims to enable next generation, programmable value transfer for participating banks and their clients in real-time across a common and open platform. The Partior platform will also develop wholesale payments rails based on digitised commercial bank money to enable "atomic" or instantaneous settlement of payments for various types of financial transactions. Such functionality would help banks overcome challenges presented by the current standard sequential method of processing global payments.

Piyush Gupta, Chief Executive Officer, DBS Bank, said: "By harnessing the benefits of blockchain and smart contracts technology, the Partior platform will address current points of friction. The open platform will enable banks around the world to provide real-time cross-border multi-currency payments, trade finance, foreign exchange and DVP securities settlements on a world-class platform, with programmability, immutability, traceability built into its suite of services."

Takis Georgakopoulos, Global Head of Wholesale Payments, JP Morgan, said: "We believe a shared ledger infrastructure such as the Partior platform will change the way payments are cleared and settled. After five years of being a partner in Project Ubin, we are thrilled by the launch of Partior as it marks yet another milestone for JP Morgan and the industry – blockchain-based wholesale payments infrastructure where information and value can change hands around the world in a 24/7, frictionless way. JP Morgan is committed to being a leader in this space as our clients transition towards multiple bank platforms, de-centralised networks and programmable money."

The operation of Partior by DBS, JP Morgan and Temasek and the completion of development, launch and availability of services on the proposed platform are subject to obtaining any required regulatory consents and approvals.

When complete, the platform aims to provide 24/7 infrastructure that will enable financial institutions and developers to co-create applications that support use cases such as FX Payment Versus Payment (PVP), Delivery Versus Payment (DVP) and Peer-to-Peer escrows to complement and value-add to global financial ecosystems.

To encourage broad participation across the banking industry, Partior will be actively engaging leading banks to join the platform to establish the scale required to benefit the industry.

The platform will start with a focus on facilitating flows primarily between Singapore-based banks in both USD and SGD, with the intent to expand service offerings to other markets and in various currencies. Partior's platform will also be designed to complement ongoing Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) initiatives and use cases.

Early this week, JP Morgan reportedly planned to launch an actively managed bitcoin fund, which marks the bank's full embrace of crypto as an asset class.