Baton Systems, a provider of high-speed, blockchain-inspired, bank-to-bank payments infrastructure, has raised more than $12 million to dramatically increase processing times and efficiencies within the $2 trillion global payments market. The Series A investment round is led by Trinity Ventures, with participation from Alsop Louie and Commerce Ventures.

The investment will fund the continued rapid global deployment of Baton’s distributed ledger-based technology, which has already been deployed at three of the world’s top ten global banks, as well as multiple exchanges and clearing houses. It was also used in a successful pilot with the Bank of England.

Baton is already processing more than $12 billion each business day in payments between market participants and clearing house counterparties, enabling more efficient management of the foreign exchange settlements and margining process. This increases transparency and reduces processing times from days to minutes, freeing up billions of dollars in tied-up capital.

The Baton platform integrates with financial institutions’ current collateral and cash systems, leaving their existing business processes, systems, and ledgers in place. Baton then provides a customizable software workflow engine to coordinate among multiple systems and institutions, achieving record-fast, transparent, and efficient settlement by moving real assets in real accounts, along with instant reconciliation and reporting for all parties.

Unlike blockchain solutions, Baton’s technology enables its clients to move real assets sitting in real bank accounts securely and nearly instantaneously without the need for digital conversion. This dramatically reduces risks and increases transparency and security, making Baton much easier than blockchain solutions for customers to adopt.

“This investment provides us with the strategic support and firepower to scale our bank-to-bank payment solution for the world’s leading financial institutions even faster and more effectively,” said Arjun Jayaram, CEO of Baton Systems. “Speed to market is critical in an industry that is crying out for modernization while at the same time facing a daunting global regulatory environment.”

“Bank-to-bank settlement today is slow and manual, trapping billions of dollars that could instead be used to grow businesses. Baton is completely transforming the global bank payments infrastructure, leveraging the best of blockchain’s potential while mitigating its key concerns,” said Schwark Satyavolu, general partner at Trinity Ventures and a member of Baton’s board of directors. “Arjun and his team are the ideal visionaries and practitioners capable of turning this tremendous need into reality — and are already doing so for their many top-tier banking clients.”

“We’ve been a firm believer in the potential of what Baton is doing for the payments industry since day one,” said Gilman Louie, partner of Alsop Louie. “Since those first conversations, Arjun and his team have rapidly moved from concept to reality with a top-tier set of initial clients, and advanced discussions taking place with the A-list of central banks and global financial institutions.”