SIA Developing Blockchain-Based Secondary Credit Marketplace

Italian e-payment services company SIA has partnered with fintech startup WizKey in order to enable financial institutions to trade loans and other debts, SIA said in a press release on 26 January.

According to the announcement, the Italian firm is developing a blockchain-based system to allow banks and funds to negotiate secondary credit transactions. The new credit trading platform is being developed in collaboration with WizKey, a Milan-based company focused on developing financial solutions. Through the use of blockchain technology, the new platform will provide financial institutions with instant and secure access to credit portfolios. The Director of Innovation & Business Solutions at SIA, Daniele Savarè, said in a statement:

“The main objective of this project launched together with Wizkey is to support banks in managing credits, especially non-performing ones, in a standardized and secure manner in line with the indications of European regulators.”

The platform will be launched on SIA’s secure infrastructure — linked to the Ethereum network to provide full transparency — which is already used by banks for SEPA payments and card services. WizKey will also provide SIA with its technology to create a debt portfolio in a “room”, which contains all the documents and due diligence activities, verified with blockchain. SIA expects to release a pilot platform sometime in the second quarter of 2021, and a full-scale launch in the second half of the year.

This is not the first time SIA has worked on a blockchain-based project for banks and financial institutions. Back in June 2020, the firm completed a cross-chain interoperability project in collaboration with technology company Quant Network. The goal was to integrate Quant Network’s Overledger into SIA’s SIAchain — a private infrastructure leveraging 570 European network nodes — and enable interoperability.