Royal Bank links up with Irish blockchain payments project

Royal Bank of Scotland is to collaborate with Deloitte and a group of Irish banks to explore the use of blockchain technology in an effort to improve payments systems.

The state-backed lender said its Ulster Bank arm is leading the industry initiative, dubbed Project Greenpay, which will use RBS’S Emerald platform.

Blockchain, a digital system for proving ownership of assets, is predicted to dramatically change industries such as the banking sector.

Technology and innovation experts from RBS, Ulster Bank, AIB, Permanent TSB and Deloitte have been testing the system at the Dogpatch Labs technology hub in Dublin by passing “dummy” pay- ments to each other to test for performance, accuracy and scalability.

Their next step is to run a pilot using live payments and explore further uses of the technology in the international payments and foreign exchange space.

Richard Crook, head of innovation engineering at RBS, said: “The Emerald platform marks a significant advance- ment in blockchain technology for customers. It’s blockchain in a way that can be used to benefit customers across the banking industry, not just blockchain concept or theory.

“RBS developed Emerald as a new way of clearing and settling payments and it made sense for Ulster Bank to take this forward, with industrywide collaboration in Ireland on Greenpay.” 0 RBS developed Emerald as way of settling payments