A group of 14 Italian banks has started an operational trial of blockchain for interbank reconciliations.

After an initial test phase, the trial will be extended to a larger number of banks, according to the Italian Banking Association’s ABI Lab. The aim is to achieve transparency and visibility of information, greater speed of execution and the possibility of carrying out checks and exchanges directly on the application.

The scope of application is the interbank check, which verifies the correspondence of two different banks. In particular, the project will verify how the application of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) can improve specific aspects of current operations which can cause complex discrepancies.

These include the time needed to identify mismatched transactions between two banks, the lack of a standardised process and a single communication protocol, and the limited visibility of transactions between the parties.

The working group selected the Corda DLT technology developed by R3 and, with the collaboration of Ntt Data for the application development. The new process provides for bilateral channels, with which counterparties can exchange information with each other confidentially.

The first group of banks includes Banca Mediolanum, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Banca Sella, BNL - BNP Paribas Group, Banca Popolare di Sondrio, Banco BPM, CheBanca! - Mediobanca Group, Credito Emiliano, Crédit Agricole, Credito Valtellinese, Iccrea Banca, Intesa Sanpaolo, Nexi Banca, and Ubi.

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