This chapter looks at leveraging blockchain to enable domestic and international remittances for corporate payments. Corporate payments require the exchange of documents and information about the transacting parties for compliance purposes. They are also prone to more cases of fraud and illegal activities when compared to retail remittances (payments between individuals or from a business to an individual). As such, blockchain technology is perfect for enabling such payments. It can enable banks and financial organizations to exchange compliance and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) information about the remittance request and the transacting parties in real time. It maintains an immutable and auditable log of all transactions that have been carried out in the payment network, along with a digital forensic record of compliance information shared with the transaction. Lastly, and probably most importantly, owing to distributed ledger technology, the time and costs associated with reconciliation in traditional payment systems are eliminated. Transactions posted to the distributed ledger are replicated in real time, across all the nodes that are part of the payment network.
In this chapter, we'll be building a four peers, two-participant organizations remittance network, using Hyperledger Fabric. Each participant will be a bank in our remittance channel. Each bank will have a corporate customer, who will be sending and receiving payments on this network. Lastly, we'll set up an InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) network between the two banks, for sharing documents and other artifacts that need to be shared with the remittance request as part of compliance requirements.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- Technical requirements
- Understanding the blockchain corporate remittance application and network layout
- Setting up the Hyperledger Fabric bankchain network
- Creating blockchain identities for the banks
- Building the corporate remittance contract
- Setting up the IPFS network
- Setting up the bank databases
- Building the bank backend servers
- Building the transaction listeners for the banks
- Creating the corporate remittance app frontend in React
- Running the corporate remittance app