These tests are designed to simplify the nostro-vostro accounts banks held to facilitate international transactions and include participation from BNY Mellon, BNP Paribas, Wells Fargo, as well as the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), the Development Bank of Singapore (DBS) and RBC Royal Bank, which were already working with SWIFT on GPI.
To test if a distributed ledger could minimize the reliance on correspondent banks, the company divided the trial into two parts. First, the PoC is being built to leverage the bank messaging platforms existing GPI resources. The second part of the PoC centres on business. On top of the blockchain implementation itself, SWIFTs developers plan to build and run a smart contract that could help automate the transfer process.
Notably, the trial will also attempt to capitalize on existing standards used by SWIFT members. The data stored on the blockchain and the APIs used to query and update that data will conform to the company’s ISO 20022 message formats.
If the blockchain proof-of concept (PoC) is successful, it could save as much as 30% of the reconciliation costs associated with cross-border payments and could be incorporated into SWIFT’ s GPI solution.
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