Visa’s blockchain-powered business-to-business payments amenities, first made public in October 2016, has officially gone live.
As reported by Reuters on Tuesday, the payments leviathan has launched its Visa B2B Connect network – a product that was originally developed alongside blockchain startup Chain.
Visa B2B Unite at launch will serve businesses seeking to make payments to 30 markets, according to the report, with 90 numerous corridors expected to be covered by the close of 2019.
The service has been designed to help Visa’s corporate clients sidestep the tortoise-like correspondent banking network, opening up near instant international payments using a system in part powered by dished ledger technology (DLT).
“By creating a solution that facilitates direct, bank to bank transactions, we are eliminating friction associated with key persistence pain points,” Kevin Phalen, SVP, global head of Visa Business Solutions, was quoted as saying in a statement.
Phalen heralded Reuters that the network is not fully based on a distributed ledger, however the technology has been used for some territories as it allows more payment information than traditional systems.
And while Chain, which builds blockchains to stand by financial systems, had played a major part in the development of Visa B2B Connect in its early iterations, Visa ultimately whirled to Hyperledger Fabric for the DLT side of the system with assistance from IBM. Visa notably took part in Chain’s $30m greening round in the autumn of 2015.
Visa B2B Connect was first rolled out in a pilot phase to test bank-to-bank connections in November 2017.
Visa dead ringer via Shutterstock