The list of new members includes Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, and Societe Generale.

The fintech firm R3’s distributed ledger initiative, already backed by nine top international financial corporations, has gained support of 13 more partners. The consortium members seek to design and apply distributed ledger technology, which underpins the bitcoin digital currency, to global financial markets.

According to the press-release, Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Citi, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, National Australia Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, SEB, Societe Generale, and Toronto-Dominion Bank join nine initial members, that is Barclays, BBVA, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Royal Bank of Scotland, State Street, and UBS. That takes the total number of organisations involved in the project to 22.

R3 CEO David Rutter said in a statement:

“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.”

The project aims to develop commercial applications for blockchain technology which would “meet banking requirements for security, reliability, performance, scalability, and audit”.

R3 in collaborations with bank partners will form working groups for research, design, and engineering of “state-of-the-art enterprise-scale shared ledger solutions” for global financial market. It will also develop consistent standards and protocol for blockchain technology to pave the way for its broader adoption.

“We have placed an emphasis on working with the market from day one, and our partners recognise that a collaborative model is the best way to quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively deliver these new technologies to global financial markets,” Rutter added.

Bank partners will provide their own internal resources and experts to the group that will work in a “sandbox” lab.

The R3 team includes David Rutter who is the former CEO of ICAP Electronic Broking with a 32-year Wall Street experience and Chief Technology Officer Richard Brown from IBM who joined the company last month.





Nadya Krasnushkina