Italian interbank blockchain project clears technical tests, likely to see full implementation by March 2020

The Italian Banking Association (ABI) has announced that Spunta Project, a blockchain-based application for interbank reconciliations, has successfully completed technical tests.

The project began back in December 2017 when ABI Lab and NTT Data Italia started working on a blockchain proof-of-concept for straight-through processing of interbank reconciliations using R3’s Corda platform. In addition to NTT Data and R3, Sia is also a technical partner on the project.

The project sees participation from a total of 18 banks, representing 78% of the banking sector in terms of the number of employees.

In a press release, the ABI said that the distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based system for interbank reconciliations could be fully implemented in the domestic banking sector by March 2020.

The new system will provide banks with complete visibility of own and counterparty movements, daily instead of monthly reconciliations and improved communication with counterparties.

The push towards full-scale implementation comes as Spunta successfully cleared technical testing on 200 million data points across 35 nodes, Finextra reported.

“The test simulated the production with the one-year volumes of 200 banks. The loading and the Data reconciliation took place in a geographically distributed environment and connected to a secure network,” ABI said (via online translation).

"The applied architecture was robust without having to resort to specific technical solutions. The methodology used allowed to analyse the operation for banking groups, and large and small banks. The test also allowed for an initial analysis of the response time process. The test was completely successful."

TokenPost | [email protected]