Billon and Raiffeisen Bank International to Pilot Digitized National Currency

• Billon and Raiffeisen Bank International successfully tested an end-to-end digitized national currency transfers PoC as part of the Elevator Lab acceleration program.
• The Polish-British fintech and the Austrian bank are developing initial phases of an RBI Tokenization Platform and will pilot this platform for selected use cases, like real-time tokenized money transfers or improving the cut-off time for custody customers.
• The pilot aims to demonstrate how companies can improve their liquidity management, speed and availability of cross-country fund transfers and facilitate new business processes.

London & Warsaw, May 18, 2020 - Billon and Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) decided to extend a successful proof-of-concept of a national currency Tokenization Platform into a pilot project, which will include selected RBI corporate and institutional clients. This pilot will lever a new form of national currency tokenization using Billon’s distributed ledger technology, successfully tested during RBI’s Elevator Lab acceleration program earlier this year.

The pilot is planned to be carried out by the end of this year. As the project uses Billon’s Digitized Distributed Cash system, it is a true tokenization of national currency and part of the global trend of commercial and central banks to develop new blockchain architectures that comply with payment and data regulations. If successful, the project could be deployed in CEE countries where RBI operates.

Stefan Andjelic, Blockchain Hub Lead at Raiffeisen Bank International, comments: “Billon is a great example of a fintech that understands how to adapt blockchain to serve the needs of banks and their clients. Specifically during the COVID-19 situation, banks need to partner with fintechs to innovate faster and help clients with payments processing and liquidity needs.”

The tokenization platform, initially called RBI Coin, was developed by Billon during the Elevator Lab program concluded on March 5th. The system enables banks to choose a transfer method that provides increased speed, more certainty of payment status, reduced exception handling and the ability to substantially reduce customer inquiries. 

With the system, e-money transactions can be supplemented with additional documents or data, such as invoices and confirmation of source of funds, for full transparency and audit trail. End-to-end benefits will be estimated at the end of the pilot, but Billon expects the bank to improve customer experience, differentiate its offering and achieve process and cost efficiencies in several categories.

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About Billon

Billon created the first enterprise DLT system, unifying national currency transactions, document management and identity management into a single architecture. We solved the challenge of transacting micropayments at scale and we also encrypt documents and data on-chain, unleashing the transformational capacities of blockchain technologies in the regulated world. Billon’s high-performance DLT system is designed to deliver tangible business results in the areas of Digitised Cash, Trusted Documents and Identity & Data Sharing.

Billon Group Ltd. was founded in the UK in 2015, following several years of R&D in Poland. Its unique DLT protocol has been supported by many R&D grants, including the EU Horizon 2020 program. Billon is licensed to issue electronic money by regulators in the UK and Poland and employs a global team of more than 80 professionals in its two offices in London and Warsaw.

Billon works to implement its technology commercially with leading business partners, such as FIS, Raiffeisen Bank International and BIK (the Polish credit office). For more information, visit www.billongroup.com.

About RBI

Raiffeisen Bank International AG (RBI) regards Austria, where it is a leading corporate and investment bank, as well as Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as its home market. 13 markets of the region are covered by subsidiary banks. Additionally, the RBI Group comprises numerous other financial service providers, for instance in leasing, asset management or M&A.

Around 47,000 employees service 16.7 million customers through approx. 2,000 business outlets, the by far largest part thereof in CEE. RBI's shares are listed on the Vienna Stock Exchange. The Austrian Regional Raiffeisen Banks own around 58.8 percent of the shares, the remainder is in free float. Within the Austrian Raiffeisen Banking Group, RBI is the central institute of the Regional Raiffeisen Banks and other affiliated credit institutions. For more information, visit rbinternational.com.