Today JP Morgan announced a new Payments Innovation Lab in Greece with plans to hire 50 people in Athens. It will be involved in global research and development, including for Onyx by JP Morgan, the division responsible for its blockchain innovations.
The new center will help develop solutions that use distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence and cryptography.
“We want to stay at the apex of payments innovation, and our new location in Athens will be a key nerve centre for our cutting edge payments innovation work,” said Takis Georgakopoulos, Global Head of J.P. Morgan Payments.
It describes Onyx as developing “products, platforms and marketplaces” for the firm and its clients.
So what has Onyx been up to so far? There’s Onyx Digital Assets with an intraday DLT repo application and one for tokenizing collateral. Its Liink solution is for messaging around conventional payments.
And there’s JPM Coin which it refers to as a blockchain deposit account. It launched in the United States and is getting ready to launch a Euro version. Some of the JPM Coin solutions focus on providing value-added services to corporate treasurers, such as programmable money. It’s also experimenting with using JPM Coin on a public blockchain as part of Project Guardian, the Singapore DeFi experiments with the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
A fourth area caters to some of the most cutting edge aspects, such as digital identity, native digital assets (eg. tokens), renewable energy and DeFi.
But listening to recent talks by the group, you get the distinct impression that what we’ve seen so far is the tip of the iceberg.
For example, the bank is looking at making NFT payments more user-friendly. Startup Ramp Network just raised a $70 million funding round for doing precisely that. Given that NFTs will play a big role in the metaverse, gaming, sports collectibles, music, art and more, there’s plenty of room for competition.
