US financial services company Wells Fargo has announced the launch of a DLT platform for international payments. With the Wells Fargo Digital Cash accounting service, the company aims to accelerate internal processes and provide better services to its customers.
Wells Fargo is a US based financial services company based in San Francisco. In terms of market capitalization, it was the second most valuable bank in the world after JPMorgan Chase in February 2017. With a pilot project based on distributed ledger technology, the bank now wants to optimize the area of international transactions.
As Lisa Frazier, Head of Innovation Group at Wells Fargo, explained in the September 17 news release , increasing digitization is changing client needs. One aspect is the growing demand for international banking services. With today’s possibilities of technology one can react adequately:
We believe that DLT is promising for a variety of use cases and we are motivated to take this important step to apply the technology to the banking industry in a material and scalable manner.
Money movements almost in real time
With DLT, the bank not only wants to optimize internal processes and increase the efficiency of its payment transactions. The aim is also the secure and permanent recording of transactions. Wells Fargo Digital Cash has the potential, according to the company, to remove barriers to real-time financial interactions across multiple accounts across multiple markets around the world. The final billing should be done without the need of third parties. This reduces transmission times and costs. Finally, it is not necessary for corporate customers to change their payment processes or responsibilities in order to benefit from the new features.
Real-time remittances are also a hot topic for the Fed, the Federal Reserve Bank. BTC-ECHO reported on August 6 the introduction of its own US Federal Reserve payment service for the immediate settlement of bank transfers. Deutsche Bank is also responding to the growing demand for real-time transaction data and cross-border payments. She is the newest member of the Interbank Information Network (IIN) of industry competitor JPMorgan.