Credit Suisse, a Switzerland-based financial services company, announced that along with R3, Ipreo and Symbiont, it has completed successful initial stage of a project to demonstrate how blockchain technology can be used to improve the syndicated loan market.

According to the official release, the Proof of Concept will continue through the end of the year and will see participation from various agent banks, service providers, and fund managers.

The project was arranged by Credit Suisse, being managed by R3 in its lab and research center. It makes use of the technology solutions from Synaps Loans LLC, which recently collaborated with Symbiont's leading smart contract technology. The project uses Ipreo’s new business process solution in order to speed loan trade settlement.

"This project demonstrates the potential for blockchain technology to fundamentally reshape the syndicated loan market and the capital markets more broadly. This demonstration sets us on a path to increase efficiency and reduce costs, which will benefit banks and clients alike. By connecting a network of agent banks through blockchain, we can achieve faster and more certain settlements in the loan market," Emmanuel Aidoo, head of blockchain effort at Credit Suisse said.

Participants include R3 consortium members BBVA, Danske Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, Scotiabank, Société Générale, State Street, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo. They have collaborated and brought important market knowledge, process experience, and testing resources to the project. Influential buy-side companies like AllianceBernstein (AB), Eaton Vance Management, KKR and Oak Hill Advisors have also involved in the initiative.

"Our goal at R3 LRC is to act as a center of gravity for financial institutions, innovative technology companies and progressive regulators, and collaborate in the research, development and commercialization of distributed ledger technology for financial markets. This partnership with R3 members, non-members and Synaps has gone a long way in demonstrating that distributed ledger technology can significantly benefit the syndicated loans market," Tim Grant, CEO of R3's Lab and Research Center said.

Synaps enables loan investors to have direct access to an authoritative system of record for syndicated loan data. This reduces manual reviews, data re-entry and systems reconciliation, thus yielding immediate savings.

"We are demonstrating that distributed ledger technology can be put to work now. Our solution addresses actual use cases and meets production standards for maintainability, security, privacy and throughput," Joseph Salerno, a Managing Director at Ipreo and CEO of Synaps Loans LLC said.