Hey big lender! Finastra, R3 and seven banks have blockchain plan
“The community of banks already on board covers approximately 10% of the global syndicated lending market and demonstrates the appetite to make this market utility a success.”
Finastra, R3 and seven banks – including BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, HSBC, ING and State Street – are working together to create a blockchain-fuelled online marketplace for the syndicated loan market.
Underpinned by Corda, R3’s distributed ledger technology (DLT) based platform, Fusion LenderComm exposes real-time credit agreement, accrual balances, position information and transaction data to lenders, from agent bank loan servicing platforms such as Finastra’s Fusion Banking Loan IQ.
As with any blockchain development, money comes up. They say the move will “slash the operational cost and burden of agent to lender administration” and provide “accurate information on demand to optimise loan portfolios”.
Simon Paris, deputy CEO, Finastra, adds: “The community of banks already on board covers approximately 10% of the global syndicated lending market and demonstrates the appetite to make this market utility a success.”
According to the organisations, real-time data has already been exchanged between agents and lenders in the pilot phase.
The Fusion LenderComm pilot phase enabled agent banks to publish loan data to the DLT platform, to extend these self-service capabilities to lenders. Through their own portal, agents can define and then publish lender-specific deal position data to Fusion LenderComm, “so individual lenders can drill down into the data without needing to query positions on the phone or via email, as is typical today”.
Corda is used to create workflows and rules for the dissemination of deal information via the Fusion LenderComm agent portal. The parties say: “Highly secure nodes on the network maintain all transaction history, giving every lender a personal view of deals they participate in and a time-stamped audit trail.”
Five of the seven banks have been named above. However, the other two are shy sensitive types and their names have not been revealed.
The platform is expected to launch next year.
Corda calling
By the way, R3 has just launched version 1.0 of Corda, for the development and implementation of applications on the platform, known as CorDapps. The platform’s codebase has been developed in collaboration with 50 R3 member firms.
R3 says Corda v1.0 follows the open source release of the platform in late 2016 and that “foundation of the platform is now complete, meaning CorDapp developers can build on Corda v1.0 safe in the knowledge that any future improvements and enhancements to the platform will not disrupt their work”.
