In a live video broadcast interview panel with Fortune Magazine, Bridget van Kralingen – IBM’s Senior Vice President for Global industries – confirmed that Stellar and its native asset Lumens (XLM) is currently being used by ‘a couple of the largest banks’ in financial exchange (FX) corridors.

The FX corridors and countries involved include New Zealand, Australia, South East Asian Islands and the UK, and is ‘up and running’. This confirmation of IBM and big institutional banks using the Stellar protocol for live cross-border financial settlements serves as further validation of the real-world use cases and potential applications that blockchain technology and the Stellar network bring. When the identity of these two large banks will be revealed remains to be seen.

Excitingly for Lumen’s holders, this confirmation comes off the back of yet more partnership news for Stellar, with recent support announcements from Blockdaemon, an established Node Deployment and Management Service company for blockchain applications, and the Dala Foundation (Dala), a leading Emerging Markets decentralised Financial System – which will be using Stellar amongst its multi-blockchain ecosystem to facilitate low-cost, instantaneous payments for their market consumers.

A great new addition to the @StellarOrg ecosystem! The @GetWala and @DalaFoundation teams are currently active in #Uganda and #SouthAfrica. Their mission is zero fee financial services for the masses 🚀 https://t.co/y2lNmhtWoO — Lisa Nestor (@nestorious828) July 20, 2018

Add this to the Poseidon Foundation’s (a Stellar ICO) recent ground-breaking partnership announcement with the City of Liverpool, StellarX’s (SDEX) much anticipated launch this summer, and Lightning Network compatibility starting this October, it’s apparent that industry partnership announcements are set to continue for Q3 and Q4.