The Qatar National Bank Group (QNB), which is the largest bank in the Middle East, announced that it will use Kinexys, a payments platform from JPMorgan that uses blockchain technology, to support corporate payments in Qatar.
As noted by Bloomberg, this action will help facilitate payments in Qatar, while moving corporations away from the inefficient traditional banking system over time and geographical limitations.
QNB intends to utilize blockchain technology to deliver uninterrupted, secure, and real-time cross-border payments, while reinforcing its digital strategy in the financial services sector.
Eliminating Traditional Banking Limitations
The new system addresses long-standing inefficiencies in traditional payment networks, which currently allow for cross-border settlements only on weekdays and can sometimes take several days to clear.
With Kinexys (QNB’s blockchain solution), QNB is now able to give its clients 24-hour availability to transact, a factor bank executives see as a game-changer for corporate treasurers.
Kamel Moris, QNB’s executive vice president, transactional banking, said it is a “treasurer’s dream,” articulating that the bank can guarantee payments to be cleared in as little as two minutes.
This is just one more indication of how blockchain is increasingly becoming an alternative way forward to resolve traditional banking bottlenecks.
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Kinexys’ Growing Transaction Volumes and Secure Design
Currently, Kinexys processes approximately $3 billion daily transactions, though significant, it remains a small fraction of JPMorgan’s beneficial daily payment flow of almost $10 trillion.
Kinexys’ system operates on a permissioned blockchain, as access is limited to participating customers, adding an important security and control layer compared to public, permissionless blockchains.
Kinexys has enabled participants to move funds deposited within JPMorgan Bank instantaneously with speed, accuracy, and regulatory requirements.
The ability to control a permissioned system in a blockchain has been attractive to major banks/institutions seeking efficiency along with security.
Blockchain Integration Beyond Payments
The influence of Kinexys is not limited to cross-border payments. In June, JPMorgan partnered with Chainlink and Ondo Finance to execute a cross-chain delivery versus payment (DvP) settlement that connected both a public testnet and Kinexys’s permissioned network.
This experiment, emphasizing the digitization of real-world assets (RWA), indicates the potential for the Kinexys platform to expand its use cases beyond payments to include areas like securities settlement and the tokenization of assets.
These developments illustrate an imminent space where blockchain will become a requirement for institutional finance and bridge the existing traditional finance model toward digital innovation.
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JPMorgan’s Broader Blockchain Expansion
The alliance with QNB comes as part of a wider JPMorgan strategy to extend Kinexys’ capabilities.
In April, the bank launched support for the British pound (GBP), which was coupled with its USD and euro capabilities, while launching programmable payment tools that automate treasury processes, according to UnoCrypto.
Most recently, in August, we reported that JPMorgan collaborated with State Street, a $5.1 trillion asset manager, in its tokenized debt infrastructure.
The partnership led to a $100 million commercial debt issuance that was tokenized on OCBC, further indicating JPMorgan’s dominance in blockchain innovation.
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