The patent application was initially filed in October, just after the bank announced plans to pilot the processing of cross-border interbank payments over its enterprise-ready distributed ledger and smart contract platform Quorum.

The big US bank believes Quorum has the potential to revolutionise the interbank payments business and invited other banks to join a newly-formed Interbank Information Network (IIN) alliance to try out the platform. ANZ and the Australian arm of Royal Bank of Canada were the first to sign up.

At the time, Emma Loftus, head of global payments and foreign exchange for JPMorgan Treasury Services, commented: "IIN will enhance the client experience, decreasing the amount of time - from weeks to hours - and costs associated with resolving payment delays. Blockchain capabilities have allowed us to rethink how critical information can be sourced and exchanged between global banks."

Although initially filed in October, the patent application has just been published by the US Patent Office. It describes systems and methods for the application of distributed ledgers for network payments as financial exchange settlement and reconciliation.

This may include:

• a payment originator initiating a payment instruction to a payment beneficiary;
• a payment originator bank posting and committing the payment instruction to a distributed ledger on a peer-to-peer network;
• the payment beneficiary bank posting and committing the payment instruction to the distributed ledger on a peer-to-peer network; and
• the payment originator bank validating and processing the payment through a payment originator bank internal system and debiting an originator account.