South Korean bank Shinhan Bank, Siam Commercial Bank’s technology innovation business unit SCB TechX, and the largest financial institution in Taiwan have on Tuesday announced the successful completion of a stablecoin remittance proof-of-concept (PoC) pilot.
The PoC was built on the highly-efficient and eco-friendly Hedera open-source public network, Hedera said in a statement.
The pilot achieved real-time settlement and real-time foreign exchange (FX) rate integration across the Thai Baht (THB), New Taiwan dollar (NTD), and South Korean won (KRW) in a test environment that aligns to current production capabilities.
The PoC is ethereum virtual machine (EVM)-compatible, meaning that any EVM-based stablecoin issuers can participate using the framework going forward.
This PoC is a continuation of Shinhan Bank’s previous work that started in 2021, when they partnered with Standard Bank on stablecoin international remittances.
The second pilot’s success marks a significant milestone in the quest for efficient, low-cost, cross-border payments.
“The successful completion of this second PoC marks an important step forward in our efforts to make cross-border payments faster, cheaper, and more accessible to people around the world,” said Byunghee Kim, Chief of the Blockchain division at Shinhan Bank.
According to him, stablecoins offer a low-cost, fast, and reliable way to transfer value across borders, which can help to increase financial inclusion and improve access to financial services for individuals and businesses in underserved communities.
“With this next phase of PoC, we are pleased to have demonstrated how the use of Hedera’s EVM-compatible technology helps eliminate intermediaries, reduce costs, and speed up the remittance process,” he said.
SCB TechX Chief Executive Officer Trirat Suwanprateeb also said that stablecoins offer a low-cost, fast, and reliable way to transfer value across borders, which can help to increase financial inclusion and improve access to financial services for individuals and businesses in underserved communities.
This announcement marks an important milestone for the financial industry, as more banks and financial institutions look to explore the potential of blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) to transform the way we conduct cross-border payments.
Shinhan Bank is a commercial bank in South Korea which provides a full range of banking services to its 27 million customers.
The bank has 887 branches including 166 global branches in twenty countries.
SCB TechX is a platform-as-a-service business that provides innovative banking services (such as loan products and checking and savings accounts) and non-banking services (like food delivery, health and wellness content, and online travel booking) to commercial institutions and consumers throughout Southeast Asia.
The Hedera network is a public ledger for the decentralized economy.
Its robust ecosystem is built by a global community, on a network governed by a diverse council of organizations, including abrdn, Avery Dennison, Boeing, Chainlink Labs, COFRA Holding, DBS Bank, Dell Technologies, Dentons, Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, EDF (Électricité de France), eftpos, FIS (WorldPay), Google, IBM, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), LG Electronics, The London School of Economics (LSE), Magalu, Nomura Holdings, ServiceNow, Shinhan Bank, Standard Bank Group, Swirlds, Tata Communications, Ubisoft, University College London (UCL), Wipro, and Zain Group.
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