ABI Lab Italian blockchain job moves to next level

The group of 14 Italian banks involved in ABI Lab’s blockchain-based interbank reconciliation pilot have moved to the second stage of the project.

Those involved are: Banca Mediolanum; Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena; Banca Sella; BNL BNP Paribas Group; Banca Popolare di Sondrio; Banco BPM; CheBanca! – Mediobanca Group; Credito Emiliano; Crédit Agricole; Credito Valtellinese; Iccrea Banca; Intesa Sanpaolo; Nexi Banca; Ubi. The project, which kicked off in December, is being executed in collaboration with R3, Ntt Data and Sia.

According to a press release issued by the IBA, “two months of real data were uploaded to the 14-node infrastructure, that corresponds to the 14 banks that are working on the interbank Spunta project. A total of 1,200,000 movements were uploaded. The performances obtained are good, thus making it possible to continue to the next phase of testing. This new test will involve participating banks working on a daily basis with the new application based on distributed databases.”

Next up

The second stage will see DLT database concepts applied to an interbank process. The consortium has selected R3’s Corda platform and will work with Ntt Data on the development of the application and Sia, who will serve as provider of the node infrastructure and define the new verification process.

The work is based on the Enterprise version of the platform which was released last June with modifications and enhancements developed specifically for the Spunta project. “The new process will, while respecting the confidentiality of the information, make bilateral channels available through which each counterparty can exchange information. Through the use of the DLT platform and the implementation of smart contracts, it will be possible to provide automatic feedback on bank transactions, thus simplifying and accelerating the reconciliation process,” the press release concludes.