Swift, the global provider of secure financial messaging services, announced its first blockchain proof-of-concept (POS), which will be previewed at the interbank co-operatives European Operations Forum in Berlin.

According to reports by Finextra, the internal POC demo will tackle the problem of asset servicing in the bond trade, from issuance to payment of coupons and maturity. Swift has also pledged to become more engaged with the community in driving blockchain application at an industry level as well as its member-owned network.

"There is a strong push from GPI banks to see how distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) can be applied to improve correspondent banking. We will specifically be looking at how we can leverage our considerable assets and bring something that has value to the community over and above what others could provide,” Damine Vanderkerken, head of R&D at Swift Labs, said.

The company has set up five separate nodes on a network for tests. The network stretches from Swift offices in California as the ID provider to an account servicer in Virginia and three investing banks in Sao Paolo, Frankfurt, and Sydney. The internal POC will be using Eris Tendermint consensus engine and smart contracts written in Solidity. It will demonstrate blockchain viability in a basic application and also provides an insight to the implementation of the ISO20022 standard on a blockchain.

Vanderkerken mentioned that the company plans to become more vocal with respect to its involvement in the blockchain technology with key initiatives planned for 2017. These initiatives include working with vendors and member banks in order to deliver an outline for the blockchain that is run by Swift and the development of a DLT sandbox.

Swift has planned to partner with its member banks with certain use cases for future application of blockchain as part of its Global Payments Innovation initiative.