An appearance by Swift CEO Gottfried Leibbrandt, at the Paris Fintech Forum on 30 January, was soon noted by media including blockchain focused news site Coindesk.
R3 – the DLT club of big banks
On stage, he gave away the sketch of the news which was then followed up with a press release a few hours later. In a proof-of-concept project, Swift will start testing its new payments standard called GPI in connection with the Corda platform of R3. R3 was formed in September 2015 by a long list of leading global banks, to create an open-source distributed ledger platform.
Plugs into gateway
The project will trial Swift’s gateway GPI Link, which will interlink with the Corda platform, monitor payment flows and support application programming interfaces (APIs).
Initially, the proof-of-concept project is meant to focus on R3’s DLT-based trade environment, but would later be extended to support other DLT, non-DLT and e-commerce trade platforms.