All year data processed. tick Banca Project, the project promoted by the Abi and coordinated by Abi Lab, has indeed successfully completed the technical test related to the loading of 200 million data, simulating the behavior in production of the entire banking world that operates in Italy. A new step forward in the project of applying a blockchain to the interbank check. The test, conducted up to now, has made it possible to verify the actual sustainability of the process and of the platform. The verification was developed with 35 nodes to get the pulse even on the territory of the concrete infrastructure strength.
The test simulated the production with the one-year volumes of 200 banks. Data upload and reconciliation took place in a geographically distributed environment and connected to a secure network. The process was then tested from north to south. The distributed nodes made it possible to load realistic movements. In other words, the applied architecture has been concrete, without the use of particular technical devices. A method was used which enabled the analysis of operations for banking groups, large and small banks. The test, in addition to data uploading, also allowed a first analysis of the process response times. The test was fully passed.
Spunta Project pilot banks and next steps
The 18 project is run by banks, which represent the 78% of the banking world in terms of number of employees. So far they have actively participated in the choices, implementation and testing of the new distributed technology.
The recently approved update of the mutual accounts between banks, will allow for the adoption of the full speed sector in the new mode starting from the 1 March of next year. The technology based on distributed registers, the so-called Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is therefore starting to be a blockchain for banks operating in Italy. The new principles provide for the complete visibility of own and counterparty movements; the rapidity in the management of flows with reconciliation on a daily basis instead of a monthly basis; sharing the rules for checking the movements symmetrically between the counterpart banks; integrated management of communications and processes in case of imbalance.
And the other partners
The project coordinated by Abi Lab, the research and innovation center for the bank promoted by the Italian Banking Association, is aimed at applying the blockchain to interbank processes. The technical partners NTT Data and Sia are involved with Abi Lab, as well as R3 with the Corda platform.
The interbank check
The new application verifies the correspondence of activities involving two different banks. The Italy inter-bank check procedure is linked to operations traditionally carried out by the back office, aimed at reconciling the flows of transactions that generate accounting entries on the Italian reciprocal accounts and managing the suspended transactions. Until now the check has been based on bilateral registers, with a low level of standardization and non-advanced operating methods. The application of a process based on the blockchain in the sense of distributed register technology (Distributed Ledger Technology) to the Italy inter-bank check allows you to automatically find transactions that do not correspond on the basis of a shared algorithm, makes it possible to standardize the process and the communication channel unique, it allows the interested parties to have visibility on the transactions.
Blockchain - Distributed ledger technology (Dlt)
The blockchain, understood as distributed register technology (Dlt), allows a large database to be distributed and distributed over several nodes, that is to say over several machines connected to each other. This allows different ways of relating and exchanging ideas between participants in different ways.
With Spunta Project, the Italian Banking Association intends to concretely bring the blockchain into the Italian banking world. The Italian banking sector is a major player in the blockchain landscape and therefore in innovation.