The financial giant considers the possibility of implementing the blockchain technology in trade finance operations. The company is already testing a blockchain remittances project.

Jeremy Shaw, head of trade finance for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, revealed the plans in an interview with Financial News.

“I think you need to take a different view and reinvent how you do business. We have a team looking at it from the blockchain perspective, for example, to look at how the distributed ledger can be used across multiple different products, and trade is one of those. I personally believe we need to look at the business from a different perspective.”

The sector of trade finance in banking includes such operations as remittances, documentary collection, open account operations and documentary letters of credit.

The interest of JPMorgan Chase in cryptocurrency technologies was declared in the company’s 2014 annual report. The corporation can learn something from cryptocurrencies, reads the document, like, for example, the possibility of instant and cheap remittances, which is regarded as the main advantage of the blockchain.

JPMorgan earlier announced that it was beginning a testing program for blockchain solutions in international remittances. The company launched USD transactions between London and Tokyo using the distributed ledger technology. It was stated at that time that the company would be ready to switch from testing mode to actually implementing the blockchain technology for a range of operations as soon as the third quarter of 2016.

The project was created in cooperation with Digital Asset Holdings, a company specialising in the distributed ledger technologies. It may be worth reminding that the CEO of the company is JPMorgan’s former top manager Blythe Masters. She had spent 27 years working for JPMorgan before joining Digital Asset Holdings in March 2015.

Elena Platonova