ING Bank has collaborated with Calypso Technology and the R3 consortium to utilise blockchain technology in an effort to help banks’ back-end infrastructures interact easier when processing trades.

The partners carried out trade matching tests on Corda (the distributed ledger technology platform developed by R3) to process foreign exchange trades, and confirmed correct matching in real time across four different time zones.

The newly-tested trade matching application allows traders involved in a transaction to look at the same information. It does that by releasing a ‘golden copy’, which becomes the single source of truth for traders. Each can then update their records in one common data set instead of collecting information from different systems.

Robbert Zee, who formed part of the working group on ING’s side, explained: “Behind two participants dealing together, there are multiple sets of data that need to be compatible to release contracts whose contents match. Currently, there are different sources of truth and various electronic messages. This slows down the process and can often lead to mismatches or duplications that need to be fixed manually.”

Ivar Wiersma, head of wholesale banking innovation at ING, added: “This is a big step in changing the way institutions process trade contracts.”

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