Distributed ledger consortium R3 and 22 of its member banks have announced a cross-border payments platform built on top of the company’s Corda technology.
Centered around the concept of creating digitized versions of fiat currencies that can be exchanged and transferred between different parties, the effort has seen involvement from banks including Barclays, BBVA, CIBC and Commerzbank.
While many DLT initiatives have experimented with specific use cases within international payments, R3 is now laying claim to be the first to develop a “shared infrastructure”, which is built on its Corda platform, in order to facilitate the full payments workflow.
According to R3, which launched in September 2015 out of a frustration from many banks and other financial institutions with multiple and disparate legacy technology platform that struggle to be interoperable, it offers “a direct alternative” to the disparate legacy systems financial services institutions are forced to use today that creates unnecessary costs, risks and inefficiencies.
David Rutter, CEO of R3, commented:
International payments systems have struggled to keep pace with the explosion of global trade and the globalisation of the world’s markets. This marks a significant milestone for distributed ledger technology as we work alongside our bank members to harness its unique attributes to build the world’s first true international payments system.