The banking industry has seen its fair share of big companies over the years, including Barclays, UBS, MUFG Bank, Credit Suisse and so on. Together, the previously mentioned banks have announced the Utility Settlement Coin (USC) cryptocurrency to help leverage instant cross-border settlements at a reduced cost.
Over the past ten years, cryptocurrencies and banks have had a… rough history shall we say?
Now though, it seems that a lot of banks are getting into cryptocurrencies themselves. The best example of this is from February 2019 when the Wall Street giant JP Morgan announced its very own JPM Coin. It is the first banking firm to announce such a project.
A number of other financial firms are warming to the idea of cryptocurrency, especially when it comes to international settlements. Fourteen banking institutions from across the United States, Europe and Asia have teamed up with the London-based Fnality International for the development of blockchain-based digital currency dubbed as Utility Settlement Coin.
As reported by CoinSpeaker:
“Leveraging the blockchain technology will help these companies to achieve instant high-value international settlements at low costs. For this USC project, Fnality has supposedly received over $63.1 million in capital investments by these banks. Some of the participating banks include State Street of the U.S., Barclays from Europe, Credit Suisse, UBS, Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp and MUFG Bank.”
The Wall Street Journal highlights that the UBS token will be functioning as a payment device as well as a “messenger that carries all the information required to complete a trade”. Even so, it will function under a fully permissioned blockchain system.
The UBS Investment strategy head Hyder Jaffrey said:
“You remove settlement risk, the counterparty risk, the market risk. All of those risks add up to costs and inefficiencies in the marketplace.”
A lot of banking firms seem to be getting onboard with crypto now but their concept of using currency tokens is very different from the other decentralised crypto tokens like Bitcoin and Ethereum. The decentralised tokens seem to be driven by the demand-supply economy and function over a distributed public ledger.
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