Iberpay, which operates Spain’s national payment system (SNCE), announced the completion of a blockchain proof of concept for smart payments. As previously reported, the five participant banks are Banco Sabadell, Banco Santander, Bankia, BBVA and CaixaBank.
The tests aimed to prove that it’s viable to release a payment when certain conditions are met, as programmed in a smart contract. For example, the payment could be released on signing a contract or when goods are acknowledged as received.
The system tested 20,000 transfers, which were executed in an average time of 2.5 seconds.
Grant Thornton was an adviser, helping with compliance as well as governance of the network.
Based on comments last year, we believe this is an e-money test. “We are developing a payment instrument in Blockchain that could allow financial institutions to issue regulatoryly viable electronic money. With this new scope, we would put into production a pioneering solution at European level,” said Carol Lago, Senior Manager of Technology and Innovation Consulting at Grant Thornton.
The specific use case tested was for bank guarantees, including issuance, registration and cancellation.
Going forward, the project plans to integrate the network with non-bank networks via an API developed by Iberpay. Hence, it would enable another network to trigger a payment on the Iberpay network.
This could be of particular interest to Caixabank, which is part of the we.trade network. So far, we.trade found that automated trade payments proved popular with customers.