For that purpose, the international organisation is launching a task force to come up with a blockchain solution. The group will include experts from Barclays Bank, Isda, UCL and Norton Rose Fulbright.

The activity of the group will be focused on creating templates and analysing the possibilities of implementing them within the current regulatory framework.

“The promise of distributed ledger technology is that we can move to a world where sophisticated financial agreements between firms can be recorded and managed consistently and accurately without duplication, error or unnecessary cost. However, for this vision to be realised, more than just innovative technology is required: this technology must be embedded in a broader legal context and be sympathetic to the reality of business,” said R3 CTO Richard Brown commenting on the new initiative.

In the long term, the task force will also work in collaboration with legal institutions and academic community in order to find the best possible way to optimise smart contracts and apply them in court and for dispute resolution.

These days, each bank keeps its own copy of a given contract, and that might lead to inconsistencies and reconciliation problems between parties that work with different banks. Smart contracts based on distributed ledger technology make it possible for each party to have the same set of legal documents.

In the meantime, the number of R3 members is growing. This week, the organisation was joined by the South African bank Absa (a subsidiary of Barclays) that has become the first African member of the consortium. Now the organisation includes 50 financial institutions.

In April 2016, the consortium presented the Corda project, a distributed financial solution for banks. This is a blockchain platform that can be used to manage and synchronise financial agreements between organisations.

Elena Platonova