Akamai, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group to deploy blockchain-based online payment network

Cloud services firm Akamai Technologies and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) have announced plans to jointly offer a blockchain-based online payment network in Japan during the first half of 2020.

Global Open Network (GO-NET) aims to provide a comprehensive set of services, including support for existing payment processing functions, pay-per-use, micropayments and other IoT-enabled payment transactions. GO-NET is the result of more than three years of collaboration between Akamai and MUFG, a release said.

The blockchain will utilise Akamai’s Intelligent Edge Platform to power the online payment network. The payment gateway will be capable of handling close to one million transactions per second, at under two-second latency per transaction.

MUFG will be responsible for providing its expertise in business development and knowhow of financial services to bring growth to the venture.

“This joint venture with MUFG sets the stage for a new blockchain-based online payment system that can better serve customers’ and partners’ payment processing needs,” said Tom Leighton, CEO and co-founder of Akamai. “The collaboration between MUFG and Akamai over the last three years has demonstrated what is possible when industry leaders join forces to solve a challenging problem. Akamai and MUFG are committed to delivering innovative solutions at a level of security, scale and responsiveness never before achieved,” Leighton added.

Hironori Kamezawa, group chief digital transformation officer of MUFG and CEO of GO-NET, said, “Financial services need to embrace digital innovation to meet greater demands for security, capacity and efficiencies, and to serve evolving market and consumer needs.” Kamezawa added, “Our goal is to enable rapid innovation in digital payment services, leveraging a transformative platform, with built-in security, hyper-scale and efficiencies.” 

The development comes after a recent report that lenders including ICICI Bank, Axis Bank and Yes Bank have come together to launch India’s first blockchain for supply-chain financing for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).