R3 CEV, a consortium of several of the largest global banks focused on blockchain, filed its first patent on Tuesday: a distributed ledger platform designed to manage financial agreements between regulated financial institutions.
The bank consortium expects to launch a full-scale version of the platform by mid-2017 with firms testing it in early 2017, a spokesman for R3 confirmed Wednesday. Current members of the consortium haven't committed to using it and aren't bound to it.
R3 launched almost a year ago with nine bank backers to develop a settlement platform for the billions of dollars in transactions processed by the financial industry each year. It has since grown to more than 60 members, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citi. The group has acted as a sort of standards-setting body thus far as its fellow blockchain vendors have begun developing technology for financial services more publicly.
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One of the ostensible selling points of blockchain technology is its potential to bring greater transparency to financial markets. But this feature has turned out to be a bug for the institutions that would use the technology.
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R3 CEV thinks it is better positioned than other blockchain startups to provide products that banks will use. Why? It is pairing with banks up front, focusing on how they approach the trendy technology.
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If the financial services industry wants to avoid spending years aimlessly testing blockchain prototypes, it needs to focus on coming up with standards and working together.
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How technologies inspired and influenced by bitcoin could reshape financial services, from payments to securities settlement to document preparation and beyond.
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In September the firm hired IBM's former executive architect of banking innovation, Richard Gendal Brown,
Corda is just one element of the wider Concord platform, the startup's development project that will allow companies to run high-scale financial applications on permissioned blockchain networks across organizations and internally,
Separately, R3 members BNY Mellon, Deutsche Bank, Santander and UBS are also working on a blockchain-based transaction settlement project called the Utility Settlement Coin, an asset-backed digital cash instrument for institutional financial markets implemented on blockchain technology. The initiative builds on earlier experiments by UBS and blockchain software company Clearmatics, Deutsche Bank said in a Wednesday news release.
