SIA, the leading European hi-tech company in the payment services and infrastructures sector, and Quant Network, a UK-based blockchain technology company, today announced they have signed a partnership agreement to explore blockchain interoperability and the creation of agnostic cross-platform applications and services for banks and financial institutions.
The first interoperability tests will be executed on R3’s Corda and private Ethereum platforms.
The partnership aims to integrate Quant Network’s blockchain operating system Overledger into the SIAchain infrastructure to enable interoperability, one of the biggest challenges and unmet needs faced by the financial industry to develop and implement blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology-based applications spanning different technologies.
Gilbert Verdian, CEO, Quant Network, said:
“We’re pleased to collaborate with SIA to explore how Overledger can enable financial institutions on SIAchain or part of SIAnet to benefit from cross-platform and interoperable blockchain applications to embrace new business models, improve operational efficiencies and deliver new innovation to customers.”
SIAchain is a private infrastructure leveraging on 570 European network nodes within SIAnet – the fiber optic network with high-speed and low-latency stretching over 186,000 kilometers – that supports financial institutions, corporates, and public administration bodies in developing and implementing, in a secure, protected way, innovative applications based on blockchain technology.
The SIAchain infrastructure makes available a series of business applications to meet the requirements of specific communities – guaranteed by SIA – of registered, approved members, in a context of transparency, confidentiality, and security.
Daniele Savarè, Innovation & Business Solutions Director, SIA, said:
“Since the European launch of our private infrastructure SIAchain, we are at the forefront of innovation in blockchain tech with the aim of supporting financial markets with a high-performance secure architecture and a clear governance model. We actively continue on our path of innovation and the achievement of a fully interoperable blockchain network is the foremost objective we want to reach with the collaboration of Quant Network and its disruptive vision on DLT.”
SIA is a European leader in the design, creation, and management of technology infrastructures and services for Financial Institutions, Central Banks, Corporates, and the Public Sector, in the areas of payments, cards, network services, and capital markets. SIA Group provides its services in 50 countries and also operates through its subsidiaries in Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and South Africa.
The company also has branches in Belgium and the Netherlands, and representation offices in the UK and Poland. In 2018, SIA managed 14 billion institutional services transactions, 7.2 billion card transactions, 3 billion payments, 51.7 billion financial transactions, and carried 1,204 terabytes of data on the network. SIA currently has over 3,400 employees, closed 2018 with revenues of €614.8 million.