Sirlibz
Takis Georgakopoulos, the Global head of wholesale payments at JP Morgan Bank said that the bank’s digital currency, JPM coin was being used commercially for the first time since the week began. The firm also decided to build a new department to house it’s blockchain and digital currency related business known as Onyx with over 100 dedicated staff.
“We are launching Onyx because we believe we are shifting to a period of commercialization of those technologies, moving from research and development to something that can become a real business,” Georgakopoulos said.
Georgakopoulos also stated that the bank is ready to work with any technology that will enable them to reach out more to areas where challenges are experienced in the payment system, areas where deploying this technological developments could potentially save them hundreds of millions of dollars. JP Morgan processes lots of cross-border payments amounting to over $6 trillion a day across over 100 countries, cross-border payments sometimes get rejected as a result of errors from account information or other general issue since it relies on a network of other banks.
Cryptocurrency solves this cross-border issue with little to no cost in fees compared to the charges banks place on theirs. Another challenge is the processing paper checks, this relies on the bunch of people to handle mail at physical locations called lock boxes.
“we’re talking about hundreds of millions of checks sent “Georgakopoulos said.
The bank can easily overcome this challenge by using the blockchain technology where information regarding a check is posted digitally thereby also skipping the mail.
“Using a version of blockchain with the participants being the main issuers of checks and the main operators of lockboxes, it’s possible we can save 75% of the total cost for the industry today, and make checks available in a matter of minutes as opposed to days.”
