DBS, Temasek and J.P. Morgan to Disrupt Payments Landscape

The trio is developing an open industry platform that aims to reimagine and accelerate value movements for payments, trade, and foreign exchange settlement.

Partior aims to disrupt the cross-border payments landscape by using blockchain and smart contracts to make digital clearing and settlement more efficient and address common pain points such as multiple validations on payment details by banks, according to a joint announcement on Wednesday.

The open platform will enable banks around the world to provide real-time cross-border multi-currency payments, trade finance, foreign exchange, and delivery versus payment (DVP) securities settlements, with programmability, immutability, traceability built into its suite of services, the announcement said.

Partior also plans to develop wholesale payments rails based on digitized commercial bank money to enable instantaneous settlement of payments for various types of financial transactions, which will help banks overcome challenges presented by the current standard sequential method of processing global payments.

Partior is a pioneering step towards providing foundational global infrastructure for transacting with digital currencies in a trusted environment, spurring a wide range of use-cases in the blockchain ecosystem,» Sopnendu Mohanty, MAS chief fintech officer, said in the announcement.

The platform will be designed to complement ongoing central bank digital currencies initiatives and use cases. It will focus initially on facilitating flows primarily between Singapore-based banks in both U.S. dollars and Singapore dollars, with the aim to expand service offerings to other markets and currencies later on.

The three partners previously worked on blockchain payments as part of Project Ubin, a collaborative project between the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the industry to explore the use of blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) for clearing and settlement of payments and securities.