Ireland’s Ulster Bank, AIB, Permanent TSB and Deloitte have joined hands in order to set up a pilot project to explore blockchain technology for use as a domestic payment rail, Irish Times reported.
The pilot called ‘Project GreenPay’ will explore blockchain to improve the speed, resilience as well as the security of domestic payment systems. The project will use the technology developed in the UK by Royal Bank of Scotland, which is Ulster Bank’s parent company.
“When we saw that RBS had that capability, we decided to use the platform in the Republic. We looked at how we could prove it at an industry level and looked at doing collaboration at an industry level,” Ciarán Coyle, chief administrative officer at Ulster Bank, said.
Coyle also said that the pilot project will utilize RBS’s Emerald platform that is known to acknowledge payments in under 10 seconds while handling large volumes.
The blockchain pilot has already been tested in Dogpatch Labs in Dublin, with the banks passing dummy payments to each other to test it for performance, accuracy and stability, according to Irish Times.
“We believe blockchain adoption will happen more quickly than anticipated and without a proactive and well-adopted strategy, banks and insurers risk being locked out of potential innovations enabled by this technology,” David Dalton, Deloitte’s financial services leader, said stating that the pilot would leverage the firm’s regional blockchain lab in Dublin.
