JPMorgan Chase & Co has tied up with six Indian banks to introduce a blockchain-based platform to settle interbank dollar transactions in the nation’s newest international financial hub.
“We will be running a pilot project for the next few months as we need to analyze banks’ experience,” Kaustubh Kulkarni, senior country officer for India and vice chairman for Asia Pacific at JPMorgan, said in an interview.
The banks include top private lenders such as HDFC Bank Ltd, ICICI Bank Ltd, Axis Bank Ltd, Yes Bank Ltd and IndusInd Bank Ltd, in addition to JPMorgan’s own banking unit at the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City), he said.
The move would provide a further fillip to New Delhi’s attempt to position GIFT City as an alternative trading center to Singapore and Dubai. The Reserve Bank of India has started a domestic non-deliverable forward market settled in dollars at GIFT City.
Under the existing settlement system, it could take a few hours for the settlement to complete. Moreover, transactions are not settled on Saturdays and Sundays or public holidays. The real-time blockchain-backed system would remove this hindrance to make it available round-the-clock.
“By leveraging blockchain technology to facilitate transactions on a 24x7 basis, processing is instantaneous and enables GIFT City banks to support their own time-zone and operating hours,” Kulkarni said.
The pilot project was scheduled for launch yesterday, using JPMorgan’s blockchain platform Onyx, after approval from the International Financial Services Center Authority.
Onyx, JPMorgan’s blockchain-based platform for wholesale payment transactions, was formed in 2020.
Huawei Technologies Co (華為) largely omitted mention of its controversial Mate 60 smartphone series at a grand showcase of its new consumer products yesterday. The Shenzhen-based company would increase smartphone production in response to demand, said consumer division chief Richard Yu (余承東), without naming the handset triggering that surge. The Mate 60 Pro earned international notoriety with its advanced made-in-China processor last month, causing concern in Washington about Huawei’s progress toward developing in-house chipmaking capabilities despite US trade curbs. Huawei’s new phones have fired up the company’s sales and were among the top sellers in China in the week before Apple Inc’s
SLUMP: The electronics, machinery and traditional industries posted the largest decline in the past year; overall, sectors showed gains over the previous month Taiwan’s industrial production index decreased 10.53 percent year-on-year to 91.38 last month, falling for a 15th consecutive month on an annual basis, as weak global economic growth continued to weigh on end-market demand and investment momentum, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said on Saturday. The industrial production index gauges output in Taiwan’s four main industries: manufacturing, electricity and gas supply, water supply, and mining and quarrying. Last month’s decline was the smallest contraction since March when the index dropped 16.03 percent from a year earlier. On a monthly basis, the index rose 7.28 percent, marking a second straight month of improvement,
US-based tech giant Google said yesterday that its efforts to build four underseas cables to connect Taiwan with the world had created more than 64,000 jobs and generated about US$26 billion in GDP for Taiwan as of 2021. The US company has transformed Taiwan into a strategic cloud infrastructure hub in the world. The four undersea cables are part of the company’s investments in cloud infrastructure in Taiwan, and on the back of the undersea cables, a data center and a Google Cloud Region, which is a geographic area in which Google provides infrastructure and services for deploying applications, Google said in
SHOPPING SPREE: The wholesale sector has lagged behind as consumer goods spending has risen, with food and beverage spending hitting almost NT$90 billion Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 4.3 percent and 14.3 percent respectively from a year earlier, while sales in the wholesale sector fell for a 10th straight month and declined 5 percent annually, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said on Saturday. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales would retain growth momentum this month due to the opening of new shopping malls and the Mid-Autumn Festival. However, the wholesale sector is predicted to see sales drop for another month on an annual basis, as end-market demand remains weak and inventory
RSS