Trimont LLC, a global commercial real estate loan servicing company, is using JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s blockchain platform to help speed up and automate loan payments, as more companies look to crypto’s underlying technology as alternative rails for money movement.

The Atlanta-based company — which manages around $730 billion in loans — used JPMorgan’s Kinexys Digital Payments network for the first time in August and is working with the bank to expand its use over the next year, according to Trimont Chief Executive Officer Bill Sexton.

The system allows Trimont to automatically identify incoming payments, check if the amount received is sufficient and distribute funds to lenders. This reduced the time to complete the process from around two days to minutes.

“There is significant financial benefit to our clients being able to receive the payments two days earlier,” Sexton said in an interview.

The tie-up underscores growing corporate interest in using blockchain-based systems for faster and more efficient payments. Banks have been exploring the technology for years, however big use cases are still rare and transaction volumes are relatively small.

New rules in the US and elsewhere globally have recently spurred more activity by large players in the space, particularly around stablecoins, a form of cryptocurrency typically pegged to a less volatile asset like the dollar that is gaining popularity in payments.

Read More: Road to a $3.7 Trillion Stablecoin Market Is Full of Obstacles

The Kinexys network was launched in 2019 and is handling $3 billion worth of transactions daily. This is still a fraction of the roughly $10 trillion in overall volume handled by the bank’s payments division every day.

Part of the blockchain’s appeal for payments is that they can happen outside of the traditional working hours for banks. They can also be programmed to move cash automatically, if certain conditions are met. JPMorgan switched on the ability for programmable payments on Kinexys in 2023.

“Programmable payments are one of the innovations that blockchain and digital currencies bring to the digitization of money,” Naveen Mallela, global co-head of Kinexys, said in an interview. “It’s the ability to embed software in money and make money smart.”

–By Anna Irrera (Bloomberg News)