Three More Banks Join in on Blockchain Initiative Totaling 25 Banks
Joining the ranks of the world’s biggest investment and financial institutions, three more banks from Asia and Europe have joined the global block chain initiative founded by R3.
Block chain, the public distributed ledger and the technology powering bitcoin now has three more backers, or bankers, with Italy’s UniCredit, Japan’s Mizuho Bank and Sweden’s Nordea joining the likes of Citi, Barclays, JPMorgan, Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC, among others who now add up to a total of 25 banks.
The global consortium of financial institutions is now comprised of the majority of the world’s biggest banks looking into the ways in which block chain technology can develop new applications for the global financial industry.
R3 CEO David Rutter said:
We have been inundated with interest in this project from banks across the world since launching with an initial nine institutions just over a month ago.
The 25-strong group of partners now form a global alliance with expertise in various spheres including sales, retail, payments, corporate banking, trade finance, and wealth and asset management.
The partnership will also bring a common goal to pool in internal resources to develop a distributed ledger solution with the aim of reduce auditing costs, improve transaction speeds and have indelible record keeping.
Deputy head at Nordea, Erik Zingmark adds:
Being the largest bank in the Nordics, we always strive to explore new technology to make banking easier and more efficient for our customers. The distributed ledger technology has the potential to reshape the banking industry, and that is why this partnership fits very well with our ambitions for the future.
Also read: Nine Major Banks Partner on Block Chain Initiative
While venture capital investment into Bitcoin-based companies and startups cools off, the interest smothering the technology making bitcoin tick, the block chain, is unlikely to diminish any time soon.
Nasdaq recently announced a first-of-its-kind trading platform for private companies powered by block chain technology. The healthcare industry is making inroads to understand how block chain would solve problems and make things simpler within healthcare. An educational institution is now using block chain to verify the authenticity of certificates. The UK Treasury recently re-emphasized its confidence in block chain.
There is irony in the way banking institutions clearly see the potential for a technological leap by integrating block chain into their financial operations and yet it is likely that bankers and those vested in the way the current system works would prefer the decentralized ledger of block chain to have centralized control instead, a motive that goes against the very concept of the block chain.
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