Swiss bank Credit Suisse recently held a global hackathon in which teams explored how R3’s Corda distributed ledger platform could help in cost savings and efficiency applications.
According to the hackathon details on R3 website, teams from India, the U.S., Great Britain and Poland competed to find cost savings under a 20:20 framework. Under this framework, the teams needed to show the potential to reduce costs by 20% in 20 months.
Starting January 24, the bank’s developers began building distributed ledger applications across a variety of business lines and back-office functions in India. Work transitioned from Pune, Bangalore and Mumbai to London, Wroclaw, New York and Raleigh, North Carolina over the course of the first day, and continued through January 25.
James Lambert, an associate at R3, explained that Corda was designed specifically to address the cost and efficiency issues that have plagued banks and other financial institutions for decades.
“We made the platform available for open source development in order to encourage collaborative thinking and innovation, and this hackathon is the perfect example of what can be achieved when open communities combine expertise to address the real-world pain points affecting the industry”, he said.
In just two days, Credit Suisse’s developers were able to design and build distributed ledger-enabled applications that demonstrated the potential for the technology to boost efficiency and savings gains for banks. The bank is committed to fund the leading solutions that showed 20:20 potential for further development and implementation, the blog post said.
“We see Blockchain as a disruptive technology that has real potential to reduce the bank’s operating costs and risk,” said Ray Mulligan, Chief Architect for Credit Suisse’s Global Markets division. “The recent Credit Suisse blockchain hackathon reinforced that idea. In just two days, we saw how quickly our developers were able to design and build blockchain-enabled applications that show the potential for this technology to drive significant efficiency and savings gains for the bank.”
