The international R3 blockchain project to develop blockchain commercial applications and standards for the financial world just got a whole lot weightier as 13 new global banks joined the distributed or “shared” ledger initiative.
R3, the international financial innovation firm, based in New York, London and San Francisco, is a multidisciplinary team including experts from the worlds of electronic banking, new tech startups, and cryptography and digital currencies development, aiming to “define, design and deliver the next generation of financial technology.”
The 13 new banks joining the project are:
- Bank of America
- BNY Mellon
- Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group
- Citi
- Commerzbank
- Deutsche Bank
- HSBC
- Morgan Stanley
- National Australia Bank
- Royal Bank of Canada
- SEB
- Societe Generale
- Toronto-Dominion Bank
These banks join current project members Barclays, BBVA, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Royal Bank of Scotland, State Street and UBS.
“The addition of this new group of banks demonstrates widespread support for innovative distributed ledger solutions across the global financial services community, and we're delighted to have them on board," R3 CEO and former ICAP Electronic Broking CEO David Rutter said in a press release.
"We have placed an emphasis on working with the market from day one, and our partners recognize that a collaborative model is the best way to quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively deliver these new technologies to global financial markets," Rutter said.
As Bitcoin Magazine previously reported
, Rutter has recruited Nichola Hunter, former ICAP trading executive; Richard Brown, a technology expert formerly with IBM UK; and Tim Swanson, a U.S.-based cryptocurrencies consultant, to work in a collaborative lab environment or "sandbox" to test and validate blockchain applications, prototypes and protocols.
This major project brings together not only the experts, but also the considerable resources of 22 big banks to collaborate on “research, experimentation, design and engineering to help advance state-of-the-art enterprise-scale shared ledger solutions to meet banking requirements for security, reliability, performance, scalability and audit.”
Photo
Clément Bardot
/ Wikimedia(CC)