Visa’s Blockchain Payments Platform to be used by Philippines Banks

Five banks in the Philippines has announced that they will be teaming up to use Visa’s blockchain-based payment platform.

According to the report, as a part of the new project, the Union Bank of the Philippines (UnionBank) will be helping four unnamed rural banks which are seeking to grow the efficiency of their payments process through building a local platform based on top of Visa’s B2B Connect system. UnionBank is the first bank in the Philippines to use B2B Connect.

Henry Rhoel Aguda, UnionBank’s senior executive vice president and chief technology and operations officer, told:

“We’re co-creating the blockchain platform which will be used by the rural banks. More banks might are also going to get included in the program in future. We want to grow from four right now to as many as we can support.”

Credit card company Visa launched a trial phase of the business-to-business blockchain payments system, built with startup Chain, in November 2017. B2B Connect is built to use it for cross-border payments for allowing payments directly between institutions so there will be no such necessity of any middlemen and preparing for commercial launch in the middle of this year.

U.S.-based Commerce Bank, South Korea’s Shinhan Bank, and the United Overseas Bank, based in Singapore are also working with Visa on the B2B project.

Recently, South Africa’s Central Bank announced that it will be Launching Ethereum-Based Blockchain PoC. Ripple also revealed that it is going to Partner with Saudi Central Bank for Cross-Border Payments.