Italian interbank blockchain project enters pre-production phase

The Italian Banking Association (ABI) has announced that its blockchain project for interbank reconciliation is entering the “pre-production phase,” Finextra reported.

The Spunta Banca Project, which is being coordinated by ABI Lab, the banking research and innovation center promoted by the ABI, aims to test blockchain potential in interbank processes. In December 2017, ABI Lab, in collaboration with NTT Data Italia, started working on a blockchain proof-of-concept for straight-through processing of interbank reconciliations using R3’s Corda platform.

The project entered the test phase in October 2018 and progressed to the subsequent stage in December.

According to the official announcement dated February 09, ABI said that a total of 18 banks, representing 78% of the Italian banking sector in terms of the number of employees, are actively involved in the testing, selection and implementation of the technology.

The project has planned a number of developmental updates including the management of infra-group reconciliations, the creation of reliable reports for auditors, and the further refinement of the matching algorithm.

Immediate steps including technical testing of the platform’s stability to check its overall performance simulating the production in the entire Italian banking sector. To do this, a data simulator will generate volumes of movements on 365 days operation.

“The simulation will be performed on a geographically environment distributed and connected via a private network. Meanwhile, we are proceeding to implement further evolutionary features with constant comparison with the experts of the pilot banks,” the ABI said (via online translation).