Jason Thompson, the former CEO of Partior, is no longer with the firm. Singapore-based Partior is the multi currency blockchain payments network formed in 2021 as a joint venture between JP Morgan, DBS Bank and Singapore government investment firm Temasek. Standard Chartered invested in late 2022. Its tokenized deposit network evolved from Singapore’s Project Ubin work that explored central bank digital currencies (CBDC). Partior doesn’t currently use CBDC.
Sources close to the firm confirmed the CEO’s departure after we spotted his disappearance from the website earlier this month, and Thompson has now updated his LinkedIn profile. So far, there’s been no announcement regarding the replacement, although the same sources said a new CEO has been chosen.
Prior to joining Partior, Thompson spent a decade at payment firms, including several years at fast-moving Grab Financial and as CEO of Grab-owned Indonesian payment firm OVO. The startup entered unicorn valuation territory under Thompson’s leadership. Notably, he didn’t previously work at any banks.
JP Morgan recently went live on the Partior network, joining DBS Bank. Partior’s first use case is for multi currency cross border payments. This is a sector known for its frictions and delays. That’s partly because it uses messaging, meaning a payment instruction is separate from the money movement. Partior addresses this by using tokenization, which merges the message and the transfer.
However, the network retains the current structure of using correspondent banks if the sending bank doesn’t have a bank account in the destination country. Settlement banks, such as JP Morgan, DBS and Standard Chartered, form the core of the Partior network.
Using the Partior network, a retail bank might send U.S. dollars via JP Morgan in the U.S. to make a Singapore dollar (SGD) payment. JP Morgan would pass the payment to Singapore settlement bank DBS, which makes the onward SGD digital payment to a local Singapore bank. That would all happen almost instantly and 24/7, which is the key benefit for retail banks. However, the settlement banks – JP Morgan and DBS Bank – still have to pay each other, and that’s done conventionally.
Partior announced other planned use cases, including FX settlement or payment versus payment (PvP).
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