Financial service company Synchrony Financial has joined financial innovation firm R3 in a move to design and apply distributed and shared ledger-inspired technologies to global financial markets.
According to the official release, Synchrony Financial will be the first credit card company to join the consortium and will partner with global financial institutions to develop innovative commercial applications for the financial services industry that will leverage the suitable elements of blockchain or distributed ledger technology.
“R3 is the largest collaborative consortium of its kind in financial markets, comprising members from all corners of the industry. We welcome Synchrony Financial to the consortium and look forward to giving them access to a huge pool of expertise from electronic financial markets and distributed and shared ledger technologies, led by our team of technologists and industry experts,” David Rutter, CEO of R3, commented.
The R3 team comprises of veterans from the financial industry, technologists and experts in blockchain and cryptocurrency, who will collaborate with the consortium members on research, experimentation, design and engineering in order to help advance blockchain technology for identity, security, scalability, privacy, to name few, with legacy systems. The addition of Synchrony Financial to the global network of R3 partners united in its lab environment and the R3 Lab and Research Centre has become important for collaborative research and testing of distributed and shared-ledger inspired technologies.
"We are excited to be a part of the R3 consortium to explore use cases for distributed and shared ledger technology. Having access to the R3 network and research will be valuable as we think through the many opportunities for blockchain to be leveraged across the consumer finance landscape,” Carol Juel, CIO, and Synchrony Financial Executive Vice President said.
Last week, R3 announced that its Corda Platform is making its code open-source. This platform is R3’s shared ledger specifically designed to record, manage and synchronize financial agreements between regulated financial institutions.
