JPMorgan Chase & Co. is set to introduce instant settlement for foreign-exchange conversions between the dollar and the euro through its Kinexys blockchain platform, with plans to add the British pound in the future.
The system will utilize JPM Coin, a tokenized deposit native to Kinexys, which handles over $2 billion in transactions daily, as confirmed by bank executives and a statement released on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg.
Naveen Mallela, global co-head of the bank’s Kinexys digital ledger, explained, “If you look at JPM Coin, we generate revenues from fees, we also generate revenue from liquidity from holding those balances. We’re coming up with a third revenue stream from FX spreads.”
Currently, JPM Coin facilitates dollar- and euro-denominated payments for participating institutions via Kinexys, a private blockchain. Although it’s one of the few large-scale blockchain projects by a major bank, it still handles only a fraction of JPMorgan’s daily $10 trillion in transactions.
The new service will enable instant settlement between the dollar and euro, with sterling set to be added once approvals are secured. Traditional FX settlements can take from the same day to up to two days depending on the currency pair.
This functionality is expected to attract more clients, including fintech companies, and bring the platform closer to breaking even, Mallela noted. However, Umar Farooq, global co-head of JPMorgan Payments, stated that it may take another three to five years to balance costs and revenue. Onyx has been renamed Kinexys in part to become less of a “mysterious thing,” he said.
The number of transactions on Kinexys has grown tenfold year-over-year, Farooq said. “We can go another 10x and we’ll be OK,” he stated, adding that they “just want to make sure that the platform is showing that it can now operate at scale.”
