IBM Blockchain announced a new blockchain banking solution 'fairX' that will help financial institutions address the processes of universal cross-border payments, designed to reduce the settlement time and lower the cost of completing global payments for businesses and consumers.

This production blockchain network with KlickEx and Stellar is one of many blockchain projects underway by IBM in financial services including foreign exchange payments netting, private equity administration, securities lending and trade finance

What is FairX

FairX is a future global payment solution powered by IBM Blockchain in Partnership with Stellar.org and KlickEx Group.

It is an IBM backed exchange used to improve the speed in both clear and settle payment transactions on a single network in near real time.

FairX application is run from the IBM Blockchain Platform on Hyperledger Fabric and was built in collaboration with Stellar.org (a non-profit organization and associate member of Hyperledger), and KlickEx Group (a regional financial services company in the Pacific region).

This innovation and collaboration will become a milestone for Stellar XLM as well as the financial technology.

FairX Supports:

Cross-asset payments

Suppose you are holding sheep and want to buy something from a store that only accepts wheat. You can create a payment in Stellar that will automatically convert your sheep into wheat. It goes through the sheep/wheat order book and converts your sheep at the best available rate.

You can also make more complicated paths of asset conversion. Imagine that the sheep/wheat order book has a very large spread or is nonexistent. In this case, you might get a better rate if you first trade your sheep for brick and then sell that brick for wheat. So a potential path would be 2 hops: sheep->brick->wheat. This path would take you through the sheep/brick order book and then the brick/wheat order book.

These paths of asset conversion can contain up to 6 hops, but the whole payment is atomic–it will either succeed or fail. The payment sender will never be left holding an unwanted asset.

This process of finding the best path of a payment is called pathfinding. Pathfinding involves looking at the current order books and finding which series of conversions gives you the best rate. It is handled outside of Stellar Core by something like Horizon.

Preferred currency

Because cross-asset payments are so simple with Stellar, users can keep their money in whatever asset they prefer to hold. Preferred currency creates a very flexible, open system.

Imagine a world where, any time you travel, you never have to exchange currency except at the point of sale. A world where you can choose to keep all your assets in, for example, Google stock, cashing out small amounts as you need to pay for things. Cross-asset payments make this world possible.

Source: https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/concepts/exchange.html#cross-asset-payments