Just two days after global investment banking giant Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYSE: GS) left the R3 distributed ledger technology consortium, R3 has announced the addition of China Minsheng Bank to its consortium to design and apply distributed and shared ledger-inspired technologies to global financial markets.
Headquartered in Beijing, Minsheng Bank is China’s first major private bank and engages in the provision of corporate and personal banking, treasury business, financial leasing and other financial services.
Minsheng Bank will be collaborating with some of the world’s largest financial institutions to develop ground-breaking commercial applications for the financial services industry that leverage the appropriate elements of distributed and shared ledger technology.
The R3 team of financial industry veterans, technologists and blockchain and cryptocurrency experts collaborate with consortium members on research, experimentation, design and engineering to help advance this technology to meet banking requirements for identity, privacy, security, scalability, interoperability and integration with legacy systems.
Consortium members work closely with R3 to develop Corda, its shared ledger platform specifically designed to record, manage and synchronise financial agreements between regulated financial institutions. It is heavily inspired by and captures the benefits of blockchain systems, without the design choices that make blockchains inappropriate for many banking scenarios.
David Rutter
David Rutter, CEO of R3 commented:
Minsheng Bank is a key player in the Chinese banking industry, and we are delighted to welcome them to the R3 consortium. Their expertise will be an enormous asset as we develop universal applications for distributed ledger technology across Asia and the global financial markets.
Hong Qi, the chairman of Minsheng Bank, added:
As an innovation-driven bank, Minsheng Bankis closely monitoring the development of new technologies, and has noticed blockchain’s influential impact on the banking Industry.
Zheng Wanchun, the president of Minsheng Bank concluded:
I am excited about blockchain technology’s ability to deliver new levels of cryptography on a distributed ledger and its potential to change the financial industry.
Minsheng Bank will join the global network of R3 partners united in its lab environment, the R3 Lab and Research Centre, which has quickly become a center of gravity for collaborative research and testing of distributed and shared-ledger inspired technologies.