By Landon Manning
Deutsche Bank AG has joined the Interbank Information Network (IIN), a banking blockchain network established by JPMorgan Chase.
JPMorgan Chase, a U.S.-based, multinational financial services company, is one of the largest banks in the United States and, by extension, the world, holding several trillion dollars worth in assets across a number of investments, hedge funds and other types of management.
In November 2018, JPMorgan Chase launched the IIN, intended as a way to more easily facilitate the transfer of U.S. dollars across international borders. Powered by distributed ledger technology, the IIN's goal is to rally the world’s major financial institutions behind a standardized, easy-to-use program for banking. Although not the industry’s only attempt at such a platform, it does represent a major initiative toward standardization.
By late April 2019, JPMorgan Chase had made significant headway into growing the IIN into a more practical staple in the financial blockchain industry. Attempting to make improvements at the point of settlement, developers from the project claimed that they had “developed a function that would verify in real time that a payment was going into a valid account, removing the potential of it being rejected days later because of an error in an account number, sort code, address or other aspect of the transaction.”
By this point, the IIN had already gotten more than 200 assorted financial institutions to sign on and was prepared to have a full-scale beta launch in the third quarter of 2019.
With that time frame almost passed, the IIN has gone live and has attracted both 65 live banks onto the platform as well as a large number of interested signatories, bringing the total number of institutions to well over 300, the Financial Times reported.
And, most recently, JPMorgan Chase has attracted the attention of another bank with a similar stature. The German-based Deutsche Bank AG is one of the world’s 20 largest banks and, in the most substantial advancement for the IIN to date, has agreed to join the project.
“Having Deutsche join — and hopefully Deutsche will be the first of several other large banks — is going to help us drive towards ubiquity and ubiquity is a prerequisite for the success of the network,” Takis Georgakopoulos, head of payments at JPMorgan, said, per the Times.
Although there is a vast tapestry of smaller banks already associated with the project, it is Georgakopoulos’ hope that the participation of multiple gigantic banks such as Deutsche will prime the pump for massive adoption of IIN’s distributed ledger technology in the financial sector. He went on to state that he expects other similarly large banks to join on the project “imminently” and that the goal of signing on 400 banks by the end of 2019 is looking feasible.
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