Professional services and consultancy giant Accenture has been appointed by Singapore’s central bank to develop a prototype blockchain solution for interbank payments. Earlier this month, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) – the country’s defacto central bank and financial regulator – revealed the successful development of three different blockchain models for decentralized inter-bank payment and settlements. The prototypes were developed using three separate platforms namely R3’s Corda, the open-source Hyperledger Fabric and JP Morgan Chase’s Ethereum-based Quorum.  The developments marked the second phase of Project Ubin, an initiative by the central bank to ultimately produce and deploy a digital representation of the Singaporean dollar. As a consortium, Project Ubin comprises of 11 financial institutions and 5 technology companies, led by Singapore’s central bank. “A key outcome of the consortium’s effort is the ability to perform netting while protecting the privacy of transactions,” revealed Sopnendu Mohanty, Chief FinTech Officer, MAS. “This helps to open up the opportunity for a wider adoption of DLT-based settlement systems. Subsequently, Accenture revealed it has now been appointed by the MAS and the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) to ‘manage and develop a prototype’ using the 3 distributed ledger technology (DLT) platforms for interbank payments solution. David Treat, managing director of Accenture’s global blockchain practice added:
Project Ubin is making a great leap forward in proving the value and potential of DLT systems and their ability to transform industries. The value of the technical innovations arising from the program is matched by the value of the strategic thinking going into how the interbank payments ecosystem will transform and build new value.
The MAS has also commissioned to publish a technical report at the end of Project Ubin’s Phase 2, sometime in mid-November. Phase 1 has already seen Singapore’s central bank successfully issue a digitized token of the Singaporean dollar via JPMorgan’s Quorum Ethereum-based blockchain.