Visa Inc. today announced a preview of Visa B2B Connect, a new platform that Visa is developing working with Chain to give financial institutions a simple, fast and secure way to process business-to-business payments globally.
Visa B2B Connect employs Chain Core, an enterprise blockchain infrastructure that allows financial transactions on scalable, private blockchain networks. First pilot test of the tool is planned by 2017.
“The time has never been better for the global business community to take advantage of new payment technologies and improve some of the most fundamental processes needed to run their businesses,” said Jim McCarthy, executive vice president, innovation and strategic partnerships, Visa Inc. “We are developing our new solution to give our financial institution partners an efficient, transparent way for payments to be made across the world.”
“This is an exciting milestone in our partnership with Visa,” said Adam Ludwin, chief executive officer of Chain. “We are privileged to support Visa’s efforts to enhance the service it provides to its clients and shape the future of international commerce with this blockchain-enabled innovation – streamlining business payments among financial institutions and their customers around the world.”
For high value international payments between bank’s big clients
Visa B2B Connect is a new near real-time transaction system designed for the exchange of high-value international payments between participating banks on behalf of their corporate clients. Managed by Visa end-to-end, Visa B2B Connect will facilitate a consistent process to manage settlement through Visa’s standard practices.
Established in 2014 Chain and has raised over $40 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, RRE Ventures, and strategic partners including Capital One, Citigroup, Fiserv, Nasdaq, Orange, and Visa. Chain is headquartered in San Francisco, CA (USA) and is the developer of the Chain Protocol, which powers the award-winning Chain Core blockchain platform.
Predictable, secure and trusted
Visa B2B Connect is designed, says Visa, to improve B2B payments by providing a system that is Predictable, transparent, secure and trusted.
Predictable and transparent: Banks and their corporate clients receive near real-time notification and finality of payment.
Secure: Signed and cryptographically linked transactions are designed to ensure an immutable system of record.
Trusted: All parties in the network are known participants on a permissioned private blockchain architecture that is operated by Visa
With Visa B2B Connect, Visa aims to significantly improve the way international B2B payments are made today by offering clear costs, improved delivery time and visibility into the transaction process. At last the investment and resources required by banks and their corporate clients to send and receive business payments will be reduced.
How the Chain protocol works
Transactions based in the chain protocol are just contents aded by a node of the blocchain community and validated
(signed) by a previously fixed minimum number of nodes. The identity of each node is known and the number of validations. The collective signing (validation) of the blockchain content (transaction) ensures that competing transactions will be resolved, transactions will be final, and history cannot be rewritten. So that this “democratic” system puts the trust in the number of validations, not in the so called power of a certification authority.
In the Chain Protocol, every transaction is a smart contract. In the simplest form, when Alice pays $10 to Bob, she is actually paying to a smart contract with one rule: only Bob can spend the money (by signing with a specific private key). The logic in these contracts can be composed to automatically enforce many different types of financial agreements with no counterparty risk.
The Chain Protocol defines the syntax and operators for composing smart contracts, as well as the validation logic that allows independent verification by every participant on the network.
Instead of having a blockchain that is reliant on the exchange of cryptocurrencies with anonymous users on a public network (like Bitcoin), a blockchain for business provides a permissioned network, with known identities, so there’s no need for cryptocurrencies.
Image over the headline.- How Visa B2B Connect will work. (Graphic: Business Wire)
