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.
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Huawei Technologies Co’s (華為) latest smartphones carry a version of the advanced made-in-China processor it revealed last year, results from an independent analysis showed. This underscored the Chinese company’s ability to sustain production of the controversial chip. The Pura 70 series unveiled last week sports the Kirin 9010 processor, research firm TechInsights found during a teardown of the device. This is a newer version of the Kirin 9000s, made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) for the Mate 60 Pro, which had alarmed officials in Washington who thought a 7-nanometer chip was beyond China’s capabilities. Huawei has enjoyed a resurgence since
purpose: Tesla’s CEO sought to meet senior Chinese officials to discuss the rollout of its ‘full self-driving’ software in China and approval to transfer data they had collected Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk arrived in Beijing yesterday on an unannounced visit, where he is expected to meet senior officials to discuss the rollout of "full self-driving" (FSD) software and permission to transfer data overseas, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Chinese state media reported that he met Premier Li Qiang (李強) in Beijing, during which Li told Musk that Tesla's development in China could be regarded as a successful example of US-China economic and trade cooperation. Musk confirmed his meeting with the premier yesterday with a post on social media platform X. "Honored to meet with Premier Li