A company that moves more than $16 trillion a year through the world’s banking pipes has plugged itself into blockchain rails. The Bottomline Chainlink partnership, announced this week, is more than another crypto integration for the correspondent-banking world.
Bottomline, a top-three Swift service provider, announced a strategic partnership with Chainlink to bring cross-chain, cross-border payments to its network, according to a statement from Chainlink Labs. Bottomline already moves more than $16 trillion in payments annually across its platforms, largely by connecting banks to the Swift messaging network. Under the new partnership, Chainlink supplies the interoperability and orchestration layer that links Bottomline’s existing payment infrastructure to both public and private blockchains.
While Swift is the messaging network that banks use to instruct payments to one another, Bottomline is one of the largest companies that helps banks connect to it. Meanwhile, Chainlink is best known as an “oracle” network, a system that lets blockchains securely access outside data and connect to each other.
Two of its tools are doing the work in the latest collaboration. The Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) moves tokenized value securely between different blockchains, and the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) coordinates a payment from start to finish. Together, they let Bottomline’s bank customers keep using the ISO 20022 messaging format they already rely on, while reaching blockchain-based payment rails through one connection, instead of building a separate integration for every chain.
That “no replatforming” detail means banks are not being asked to adopt new infrastructure, only to route existing messages through a new layer. Some press coverage of the deal has estimated the number of Bottomline bank customers gaining this access at more than 600. However, Chainlink’s own announcement did not specify a figure.
Alongside Citi’s live blockchain settlement transactions on Swift’s own shared ledger this same week, a pattern starts to form. Citi, a bank, is settling live dollar payments on a blockchain-based ledger. Bottomline, infrastructure that sits underneath hundreds of banks, is doing something similar from the messaging side. This way, we see two different layers of correspondent banking moving toward blockchain settlement. From the pattern, it seems the plumbing underneath the entire system is being upgraded piece by piece.
