Jasper: Canada's financial industry relies on Blockchain

The Canadian project Jasper III is intended to modernize and bring the financial market closer together using distributed ledger technology. The consortium is very satisfied with the implementation. Only the claim to reduce the costs thanks to the Blockchain, does not work as hoped.

A Canadian financial consortium around the Central Bank of Canada is developing a comprehensive transaction system for the financial industry under the project name Jasper. The goal is not only to make financial transactions more efficient, but also the entire trade including the securities market.

Jasper in competition to SWIFT

Jasper is thus in competition with the internationally established SWIFT standard for decades. Transactions of almost any kind are processed in the interbank market via the SWIFT communication system. However, the system has gotten old and the completion of transactions can take several days.

Bank of Canada, TMX Group, Payments Canada and the consulting firm Accenture are now demonstrating that a transaction of central bank money or securities is almost in real time, Reuters reports. The tokenized assets change hands within seconds using R3's distributed ledger technology without any active intervention from the banks.

The R3 consortium now represents more than 200 partners of financial service providers. These include technology companies, central banks and regulators. They work together on DLT solutions for the financial industry and now also for other industries. For example, R3 has been cooperating with Microsoft and Amazon for several months now.

Jasper III: Third Phase of the Proof of Concept

The Jasper project started in March 2016 and is now in the third and final phase of the proof of concept. The aim is to make the transactions more efficient and cheaper on the Canadian market. In the long term, of course, international transactions are intended, but in the short term the hurdles are very high. Payments Canada's CEO said, "It's possible to transfer payments in a way never seen before - transferring the money directly from the buyer to the seller in real time."

Although the consortium is successfully implementing Jasper III and is seeing an extreme increase in efficiency for the participating companies, there are no financial benefits. Bank of Canada's Senior Specialist Scott Hendry recently announced at a payment conference in Toronto that despite the distributed ledger technology, the savings potential is very limited. "After all this work, we are still unsure whether there will be a major reduction in costs," he explains. The cause can be found in the design of the technology. The consortium relies on a closely monitored and non-transparent "blockchain". Only the parties directly involved have access to the transactions. In the meantime, no other model can be imagined for the banks: otherwise, they will no longer be needed in this process. It will be a few more years before the DL technology in the financial industry gets along without intermediaries. Although the efficiency of these processes will increase until then, the costs will not drop.