An Austrian banking group Raiffeisen Bank International A.G. (RBI) in cooperation with fintech firm Billon have successfully tested an end-to-end digitized national currency transfers PoC as part of the Elevator Lab acceleration program.
According to an official press release, the Polish-British fintech and the Austrian bank are developing initial phases of an RBI Tokenization Platform and will pilot this platform for selected use cases.
The pilot reportedly aims to show how companies can improve their liquidity management, speed and availability of cross-country fund transfers with the help of digital currency.
"Specifically during the COVID-19 situation, banks need to partner with fintechs to innovate faster and help clients with payments processing and liquidity needs," said Stefan Andjelic, Blockchain Hub Lead at Raiffeisen Bank International.
The platform called RBI Coin was initially developed by Billon during the Elevator Lab. It allows financial institutions to choose a transfer method that provides increased speed, more certainty of payment status, reduced exception handling and the ability to substantially reduce customer inquiries, the press release says.
Previously the Head of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub Benoît Cœuré at the Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee expressed an opinion according to which the current discussion on central bank digital currency (CBDC) came into sharper focus.
The Covid-19 pandemic already highlighted the value of having access to diverse means of payments, and the need for any means of payments to be resilient against a broad range of threats, Cœuré said.
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