Today Italian payments infrastructure company SIA announced a partnership with UK-based Quant Network to explore using Quant’s Overledger technology for blockchain interoperability.
The relationship aims to create cross-platform applications and services for financial institutions. The first test will explore the interaction between enterprise blockchain R3 Corda and private Ethereum.
SIA runs a secure private network infrastructure with nodes in 570 banks and corporates. The company is known as a major backbone provider for the European SEPA payment method, which is the primary payment route for cross border payments within the E.U. It also provides card processing services.
SIA doesn’t use the internet. Instead, the company’s fiber-optic network which stretches over 186,000 kilometers, processes roughly 40% of SEPA transactions. It also runs SIAchain a strategic partnership with R3 to provide on-premises Corda nodes to its clients.
“We actively continue on our path of innovation and the achievement of a fully interoperable blockchain network is the foremost objective we want to reach with the collaboration of Quant Network and its disruptive vision on DLT,” said Daniele Savarè, Innovation & Business Solutions Director, SIA.
Quant Network started in 2015, and last month was named as a Gartner Cool Vendor in Blockchain Technology for 2019. One of its main products is Atlas a cross border open banking solution which is powered by Overledger. The Overledger blockchain solution currently supports enterprise blockchains running on Hyperledger, Corda, JP Morgan’s Quorum, Ethereum, Ripple as well as two permissionless blockchains.
Gilbert Verdain, Quant’s CEO, has an impressive resume. According to his Linkedin profile, he is a founder of one of the primary ISO blockchain standards and worked for the U.S. Federal Reserve, the U.K.’s Treasury and the Bank of England.
Another player in the interoperability space for financial institutions is U.K. startup Clearmatics. Earlier this year Clearmatics ran a hackathon for its interoperability protocol ION. It’s the technology partner of the Utility Settlement Coin project, a new digital currency where 13 major banks and Nasdaq own the company Fnality.
