“Since the European launch of our private infrastructure SIAchain, we are at the forefront of innovation in blockchain technology with the aim of supporting financial markets with a high-performance and secure architecture and a clear governance model. We actively continue on our path of innovation and the achievement of a fully interoperable blockchain network is the foremost objective we want to reach with the collaboration of Quant Network and its disruptive vision on DLT”, says Daniele Savarè, Innovation & Business Solutions Director, SIA.

Banks need blockchain Interoperability

Towards the end of 2017 SIA announced a Partnership with R3 a banking consortium utilising their Corda platform. Members of the consortium consist of banks such as Bank of America, Barclays, BBVA, BNP Paribas, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, ING, Intesa Sanpaolo, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Mizuho Bank, National Australia Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Scotland, Scotiabank, Société Générale, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, Toronto-Dominion Bank, U.S. Bancorp, UBS, UniCredit and Wells Fargo

There are many other blockchains been utilised with Banks, such as JP Morgan’s Quorum which is a permissioned variant of Ethereum. JP Morgan’s Coin would require interoperability with other blockchains being used by Banks such as Corda and Hyperledger.

Others include Fnality (previously known as Utility Settlement Coin) who are building tokenized versions of five major fiat currencies in partnership with Clearmatics who are utilising a private version of Ethereum. Banks involved were UBS, Banco Santander, Bank of New York Mellon, State Street, Credit Suisse, Barclays, HSBC Holdings and Deutsche Bank AG.

As well as We.Trade consortium utilising Hyperledger Fabric and is currently in live production consisting of banks such as Deutsche Bank, HSBC, KBC, Natixis, Nordea, Rabobank, Santander, Societe Generale and UniCredit

Overledger bringing blockchain interoperability immediately to all 570 Banks / Trading partners

The really important thing to understand with this partnership is that SIA will be integrating Overledger into SIAChain. They already have built the network, deployed supernodes at all their customers sites and already have loads of banks using various blockchain applications. With this partnership they now can utilise Overledger to benefit from blockchain interoperability with just 3 lines of code and less than 8 minutes.

Companies such as Ripple, Stellar etc have to take years rolling out their infrastructure / software to individually connect each bank. By SIA Integrating Overledger into SIAChain, all 570 banks / trading partners have access to Overledger instantly. It’s also a closed private network so its not like they can just integrate other solutions unless they have been integrated into SIAChain.

The key is SIAnet and SIAChain is an existing financial infrastructure that already is used and interconnects 570 banks and financial institutions. The access and adoption is already there, all the banks are already connected and using the network. Difference is now, it has Overledger. It would have taken us 10+ years to onboard 570 banks one by one and build the infrastructure. This is where Ripple, Stellar (IBM) are stuck and adoption will take many years to individually connect each bank. We already have all of them connected now.

Spunta Banca

SIAchain was selected for the operational testing of the “Spunta Banca” project — coordinated by ABI Lab, the research and innovation center promoted by the Italian Banking Association — based on blockchain technology that involved 18 Italian banks performing a proof of concept with excellent results. This has now progressed to technical tests with 200 banks and 200 million data items for a year before going into production.

Just a couple of days ago an update of the Agreement for the maintenance of reciprocal accounts between banks with regard to the interbank check was approved, this allows the development of the check process using Distributed ledger technology (DLT), starting from 1st March 2020. It is therefore a blockchain for banks operating in Italy.

FINSEC Project funded by Horizon 2020

FINSEC, (Integrated Framework for Predictive and Collaborative Security of Financial Infrastructures), is a flagship project which will develop, demonstrate and bring to market an integrated, intelligent, collaborative and predictive approach to the security of critical infrastructures in the financial sector. FINSEC will provide a blueprint for the next generation security systems for the critical infrastructures of the financial sector.

The FINSEC project will provide tools for stakeholders’ collaboration in the financial supply chain to leverage the results of the previous tasks, while supporting assets modelling and interrelationships for financial services involving multiple participants, such as SWIFT network interactions.

The blockchain will be established and will operate in a fully decentralized manner,i.e. it will not be under the control of any administrative entity. Nevertheless, each participating entity (e.g., a bank or another financial institution) will interface to the blockchain infrastructure through a ledger client application, which shall make use of a blockchain API enabling the execution of the chain code. The entire data sharing process will be driven by a data model: the latter will specify the subset of security information that will be shared by each blockchain participant

Game Changer for Quant Network and for Blockchain Mass Adoption by Financial Institutions

This is a game changer for Quant. SIA are integrating Overledger into the leading financial private network in Europe enabling blockchain interoperability to all of its 570 Banks, Central Banks, Stock Exchanges, Trading venues etc immediately. Not having to spend years rolling our infrastructure / software, they can all benefit today.

This number will only increase with the recent news that SIA, in partnership with Colt Technology Services, has won a 10 year tender commissioned by the European Central Bank for the provisioning of connectivity services allowing European central and commercial banks, central depositories, automated clearing houses and other payment service providers to connect directly to Eurosystem market infrastructures through a single access interface (Eurosystem Single Market Infrastructure Gateway — ESMIG).

To find out more about Quant Network and Overledger please see the links below.

Part One — Blockchain Fundamentals

Part Two — The Layers Of Overledger

Part Three — TrustTag and the Tokenisation of data

Part Four — Features Overledger provides to MAPPs

Part Five — Creating the Standards for Interoperability

Part Six — The Team behind Overledger and Partners

Part Seven — The QNT Token

Part Eight — Enabling Enterprise Mass Adoption

Quant Network — Enabling Mass Adoption of Blockchain at a Rapid Pace

What is a blockchain operating system and what are the benefits? Introducing Overledger from Quant Network

Wall Street 2.0: How Blockchain will revolutionise Wall Street and a closer look at Quant Network’s Partnership with AX Trading

Large Enterprise Adoption of Blockchain is happening, enabled by Quant Network’s Overledger