Standard Chartered Backs Blockchain Payment Firm Partior

Financial services company Standard Chartered (SC) will invest in Partior, a blockchain-based clearing/settlement platform from Singapore.

“Standard Chartered brings to the network its global payments expertise and clearing footprint, significantly strengthening Partior’s international reach and capabilities,” the company said in a news release Thursday (Nov. 3).

The deal makes SC one of Partior’s founding partners and the first European settlement bank for the Partior platform, letting it expand its currency offerings by next year, according to the release. It also lets SC speed the deployment of its blockchain technology across its global payments and settlements network.

“Our investment in Partior will allow us to deliver the speed, efficiency and visibility of domestic settlement systems to cross-border transactions, simplifying and improving the experience for our clients,” said SC Global Head of Cash and Transaction Banking Philip Panaino in the release.

“As we navigate the increasingly connected payments universe, we recognize that a concerted effort is needed,” he added.

September saw Standard Chartered wrap what it called an industry-first test of the trade financing validation service from MonetaGo via the SWIFT payments system.

Read more: Standard Chartered Tests Duplicate Finance Detection Tool

The company said at the time that it carried out this pilot to “mitigate the risks of duplicate trade finance fraud on a global scale.”

Trade financing validating service is the “first natively global solution that is interoperable between markets” and provides checks on financing transactions to identify and prevent duplicate financing frauds, SC said in September.

“Trade finance providers register select document information by sending the information via [application programming interface [API]),” SC said in a press release at the time. “MonetaGo’s Secure Financing system cryptographically hashes the data to create document fingerprints that can be compared with already registered document fingerprints to detect duplicates.”

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