Visas distributed ledger platform joins IBM for cross-border payments

The B2B Connect platform was unveiled by Visa in 2016, and it was developed together with Chain, an alternative solution to global payments rail SWIFT that serves as a seamless rout for large payments between businesses.

The platform operates as a supplier of “digital identity” that tokenizes highly sensitive data such as account numbers and banking details with a unique identifier to facilitate faster transactions susceptible to fewer fraud. The system largely benefits for payments in verticals such as supply chain, trade, and institutional banking, since it runs on an internal Visa network instead of the correspondent banking system.

Since 2016, Chain has been Visa’s only business partner for the B2B Connect projects. However, now Visa plans to provide a commercial launchpad for B2B Connect in the first quarter of 2019 and for this the company has teamed up with IBM, thus receiving a right to use blockchain code from the Hyperledger Fabric.

Notably that the system already has earlier adopters. As Coinspeaker previously reported Thailand’s fourth-largest bank, Kasikornbank has signed on to test the B2B project.