Business magazine Fast Company recently covered Quant’s work on opening new cross-border and domestic payment opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean with LACChain and Oracle.
The BRIC economies were once tipped to reshape the global financial landscape, but Brazil and the rest of Latin America’s potential have yet to be fully realised. LACChain, a pan-regional blockchain programme run by the International Development Bank has stepped in. Working with Quant, they’ve launched an initiative using distributed ledger technology to help solve one of the region’s most pressing economic issues.
The speed and cost of payments and remittances remain a key challenge for business owners exporting products in Latin America. They often have to wait weeks to be paid. “It comes down to cashflow, and there’s a lot of uncertainty. You can’t have transparency of where your money is, and how long it will take to get paid, so it’s a case of wait and see for the business owner,” says Quant’s Founder and CEO Gilbert Verdian.
To solve this issue, LACChain uses blockchain and integrates it into the core banking infrastructure. Users can then receive payment in the form of a new digital Latin American dollar straight away and redeem it as local currency from their bank. “Real-time digital assets make getting paid instantaneous. All users need is a phone,” says Gilbert.
Quant’s Overledger API gateway helps make this happen by enabling participants to connect their private, public, and permissioned blockchains to LACChain. “Networks and DLTs that were siloed can now connect,” Gilbert explains.
Oracle certified the Overledger Gateway as an interoperability solution for its Oracle Blockchain Platform last year, enabling its customers to orchestrate transactions spanning Oracle Blockchain and other permissioned and public blockchain ledgers more easily.
