Credit union technology group CULedger has partnered with tech company Swirlds on a new system for cross-border payments, according to an announcement from the two organizations.

CULedger said it will use the company's Hedera hashgraph platform and public ledger as part of the MyCUID global identity project to build a comprehensive system for identity and global payments. The idea is to help reduce the cost and complexity of making cross-border payments, it noted.

“Currently, cross-border payments are painful for all parties involved,” CULedger COO Rick Cranston said. “They take time, they're expensive and there is limited visibility into the transaction. Hashgraph is fast and it provides visibility between the two parties at a significantly lower cost. It also eliminates concerns regarding fraud and default, since transactions are recorded immutably on the public ledger, and manual processes, since transactions are automated via smart contracts.”

“Equally important for us was that any distributed ledger we build on must provide stability, so that we, our application developers, and our credit unions can feel confident in the long-term support and community of the distributed ledger we use,” Cranston added. “This made Hedera the only choice for us.”

CULedger is a credit union industry initiative for developing applications based on distributed ledger technology, which offers a protocol for financial transactions innovation. It began in 2016 as a “research to action” initiative for developing a concept for a credit union system-wide, permissioned distributed ledger platform. The organization announced the formation of CULedger, LLC, a new CUSO, in 2017.

CULedger has already been using the private ledger version of hashgraph for general purpose, permissioned ledger use, but it is also developing what it calls a “global self-sovereign digital identity” system intended to cut the risk of cybersecurity and fraud, it noted.

Its partner platform, Hedera hashgraph, is designed to be a public, mass-adopted distributed ledger that lets developers create globally distributed applications, according to the announcement. The company believes its version of a public ledger is more efficient than a blockchain.

Commonly associated with bitcoin, a blockchain is a public and distributed ledger of executed transactions. A distributed ledger is a digital record of ownership that does not include a central administrator or central location for stored data. Proponents of blockchain technology believe it could introduce trust and transparency to any online transaction.

Shared-ledger technology creates an online system through which multiple certified parties can securely exchange information and conduct transactions with those exchanges certified by all the organizations, called nodes, participating in a permissioned network using distributed ledger technology.

This latest news comes on the heels of PSCU's announcement last month of its investment in CULedger. Last December, CULedger also appointed a new CEO, John Ainsworth, who is a former executive vice president at Mastercard.