JPMorgan Chase launches payment processing network that uses blockchain tech, in partnership with Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, Royal Bank of Canada
Evelyn Cheng / CNBC :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2017 launch put JPMorgan's name on a blockchain payments network built with Australia and New Zealand Banking Group and Royal Bank of Canada — notable because RBC had already been down this road a year earlier via the Bank of America–Santander–RBC consortium on Ripple's ledger. The difference here is that JPMorgan owns the rails rather than renting them.
The bet paid out along a visible arc: the alliance scaled to more than 75 of the world's biggest banks by 2018, the tech was productized as JPM Coin in 2019, extended to euro payments in 2023 after roughly $300B in cumulative volume, and now runs at $1B per day. A separate 2021 platform venture with Temasek and DBS extended the same playbook into trade and FX settlement.
First-order effects
- JPMorgan, ANZ, and RBC gain an interbank settlement rail they control end-to-end, moving cross-border payments off correspondent-banking intermediaries and onto shared ledger infrastructure.
Second-order effects
- The network's growth to 75+ member banks turned it into a de facto standard that rival consortia — like the Ripple-based group RBC joined in 2016 — must match on speed and membership to stay relevant.
Third-order effects
- If bank-owned ledgers keep compounding from pilot to $1B-a-day production, wholesale payments consolidate around a few proprietary token networks, shifting settlement power from SWIFT-style utilities to the largest issuing banks.
The trend: Global banks are converting blockchain pilots into proprietary interbank payment rails, with JPMorgan's network as the template for scaling from consortium to production utility.