Italian banks together with SIA, R3, NTT Data join Spunta blockchain infrastructure for payments

Spunta Banca DLT, an Italian initiative providing a blockchain infrastructure that supports the ABI Spunta application, has announced that it is fully operational.

Moreover, since October 2020, around 100 banks have been operating on Spunta, using the network’s interconnected nodes in bilateral accounts’ reconciliation. The ABI Spunta application is a project promoted by ABI for the application of a blockchain to the interbank reconciliation process. ABI is coordinated by ABI Lab - the banking research and innovation centre promoted by the Italian Banking Association (ABI).

ABI Spunta sees the commitment of technical partners such as NTT Data and SIA, in addition to R3 with the Corda Enterprise platform. It aims to create of an international working group to set out the requirements to match the characteristics of the ‘nostro’ and ‘vostro’ account processes across different countries and therefore to extend the application across the European banking sector.

Some figures about Spunta:

• Thanks to the algorithm for information matching, discussed and agreed by the workgroup of banks, the automatic match rate is 97,6%;
• Starting with March 1, 2020, the Spunta infrastructure processed 204 million transactions related to the 55 banks that migrated in the first two waves. The time required to complete the processing is about one hour per night. By the end of 2020, the number of processed transactions is expected to exceed 350 million.
• If this application will be applied to more complex cases, working at its full capacity, it was estimated that the infrastructure would be able to manage a total volume of 8.4 billion transactions. As term of comparison, Bitcoin’s blockchain in the entire 2019 managed 117 million transactions.