Partior, a cross-border payment network backed by big banks JPMorgan Chase & Co., Standard Chartered Plc. and DBS Bank Ltd., today announced it has raised $60 million in a Series B funding round.

The round was led by Peak XV Partners with support from Valor Capital Group and Jump Trading Group as new investors. J.P. Morgan, Standard Charter and Temasek Holdings Ltd. joined the round as existing shareholders in the company.

Partior began as a settlement network to disrupt the slow payment mechanism between banks and financial institutions across borders, which can take days to complete using legacy infrastructure. The company’s blockchain distributed ledger infrastructure allows for commercial bank deposits and other assets to be transacted on the network for near-instant payments without needing to rely on older networks. It also uses the blockchain as a reliable validation of the history of transactions.

Incorporated in 2021 by Singaporean investment firm Temasek alongside big banks JPMorgan and DBS as founding shareholders, the company is also backed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Standard Chartered also joined as a founding shareholder in 2022.

DBS, J.P. Morgan and Standard Chartered are already using Partior’s network to settle payments for their customers, the company said. Other customers include German multinational technology conglomerate Siemens AG and digital banking platform iFAST Financial Pte Ltd., who have used the platform through Standard Chartered to increase the speed of their payment flows.

“Partior is breaking down silos and rewriting the rules for cross-border clearing and settlement. We see a very bright future for blockchain-based frictionless, cross-border transactions,” said Chief Executive Humphrey Valenbreder. “Having some of the world’s best banks and investors back our vision validates this even further.”

The company said the new funding will be used to expand services for the platform, including new capabilities such as intraday foreign exchange swaps of currency, managing enterprise liquidity via software and just-in-time multibank payments. Partior added that the investment will support the company’s international network growth and integration of numerous additional currencies beyond the U.S. dollar, the euro and the Singapore dollar.

The use of blockchain networks for cross-border payments has been explored for some time, including by JPMorgan, which announced an Ethereum blockchain-based platform in 2017. The same year, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, which is responsible for international financial settlements, expanded its own blockchain platform Global Payments Innovation Initiative to cover more banks.

More recently, London-based financial technology firm Fnality International Ltd. raised $95 million in late 2023 to expand its platform that allows banks to use blockchain technology to settle payments in near real-time and also reduce the amount of paperwork involved.

“After devoting a significant part of my career to solving some of the great challenges of global payments, I have seen firsthand how essential it is for the cross-border payments and settlements infrastructure to be modernized,” said Dan Schulman, managing partner at Valor Capital Group. “We see tremendous potential in Partior to do just that.”

Image: Pixabay