Kasikornbank (Kbank), Thailand’s largest bank by market capitalization, has joined the pilot program for Visa B2B Connect, a blockchain-based platform designed to give financial institutions a secure and fast way to process corporate cross-border B2B payments. The platform is built on Chain, an enterprise blockchain company recently acquired by Stellar.
Launched last year, Visa B2B Connect is gearing up for commercial launch and has been working with several banking partners including Commerce Bank in the US, Shinhan Bank in South Korea, Union Bank of Philippines and United Overseas Bank in Singapore.
“Building on the enterprise blockchain technology, Visa B2B Connect is a new transaction platform designed for the exchange of high-value international payments between participating banks on behalf of their corporate clients. Managed by Visa end-to-end, Visa B2B Connect combines Visa’s core capabilities in security, governance and distributed ledger technology, ” said Suripong Tantiyanon, manager of Visa Thailand, according to a report by The Nation.
Visa’s goal is to be able to facilitate bank-to-bank transactions on the blockchain and “to create a more efficient, transparent way for business-to-business payments to be made across the world.”
Kbank is the first Thai bank to join the program.
Visa first mapped out their vision for its payments platform in October 2016.
According to a statement by Visa,
“Building on this technology, Visa is developing a new near real-time transaction system designed for the exchange of high-value international payments between participating banks on behalf of their corporate clients. Managed by Visa end-to-end, Visa B2B Connect will facilitate a consistent process to manage settlement through Visa’s standard practices.
With Visa B2B Connect, Visa aims to significantly improve the way international B2B payments are made today by offering clear costs, improved delivery time and visibility into the transaction process – ultimately reducing the investment and resources required by banks and their corporate clients to send and receive business payments.”
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Founded in 2014, Chain is San Francisco-based fintech startup with several legacy titans as strategic partners including Visa, Capital One, Citigroup, Fiserv, Nasdaq and Orange. Chain was recently acquired by Lightyear, the commercial development arm of Stellar, and rebranded as InterStellar.
According to Adam Ludwin, CEO of Interstellar and co-founder of Chain,
“All of the clients that we have now have effectively shifted from using a traditional database model to using a tokens model, issuing assets on a local environment. By partnering with Stellar you can fire an asset to another institution.”